Revealing the world of engineering to young minds

Showing high school students the value of engineering

The project aspires to much more than preparing high school students to study engineering in college, says Adam Carberry, a Fulton Schools associate professor of engineering education and a co-principal investigator on the e4usa project.

“Our overarching goal is to demystify and democratize engineering. We want to see a generation of young people who don’t think of engineering as an esoteric field, but something that can serve the very basic needs of their communities,” Carberry says.

Beyond giving students a big-picture view of engineering’s impacts on society, e4usa wants them to see how basic knowledge of the fundamentals of engineering can be applied to numerous other professional pursuits.

“Communication, teamwork and leadership skills, and especially problem-solving skills, can be learned through an understanding of engineering,” Carberry says.

It’s a generally accepted precept of the U.S. education system that all students should learn reading, writing, math and history. The e4usa leaders want to see introductory engineering lessons added to that list.

“It should be a core subject in high school,” says Darryll Pines, the president of the University of Maryland, a professor of aerospace engineering and e4usa’s principal investigator. He is adamant that the technological literacy and critical thinking that engineering can teach are essential to being successful in today’s world.

Pines and Carberry note that e4usa is among the programs the NSF highlights as one of its foremost workforce development endeavors.

Promoting diversity and equity in education

The ASU collaboration with e4usa started with a discussion at an American Society for Engineering Education conference between an NSF program manager, Pines and Professor Ann McKenna, who is the Fulton Schools vice dean of strategic advancement. They agreed to leverage ASU’s strengths and combine efforts to advance a proposal effort around e4usa. NSF funding was awarded in 2018.

McKenna says she sees the undertaking as “a meaningful way to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in engineering and the STEM fields, and to make it accessible to all,” including students who won’t become engineers.

“Maybe down the road those students become journalists or politicians, but something they learned about engineering will be valuable to them,” she says.

The project now led by the University of Maryland, ASU, Morgan State University, Vanderbilt University and Virginia Tech has partnerships with 13 other universities and 36 high schools around the country, including four in Arizona — and e4usa leaders hope to soon receive new NSF funding to support expansion of the project for at least several more years.

Recently, one of Dalal’s e4usa ideas won an ASU Knowledge Mobilization Grant, which recognizes innovative solutions to challenges in education posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. She compiled materials for mail-in design kits and conducted a virtual workshop for high school counselors to help them develop engineering literacy through hands-on engineering design experiences.

A presentation about the design kits and the workshop will be featured in ASU’s virtual display booth at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February, to be hosted by ASU. 

Dalal is now co-leading e4usa’s qualitative research and is also involved in other components of the project, including curriculum design, student assessments and teacher professional development.

The research will examine students’ experience with the curriculum, teachers’ implementation of the curriculum in diverse classrooms and the overall intended educational outcomes.

Changing perceptions through broader perspectives

She also wants the project to make impacts in others ways. Like Carberry, Pines and McKenna, Dalal sees a need to alter the image of engineers from that of simply geeky technologists to creators and innovators.

Many young students, she says, “tend to think of engineers as workers who operate machines or work on computers in isolated cubicles. We have to show them the humanistic side of engineering, that all the technologies engineers make and use are about helping people.” 

Dalal also wants to contribute to broadening the targets of that messaging to include various segments of the population.

“We have a lot of work to be done to reach out to students in underserved communities,” she says.

Stacy Klein-Gardner, the co-director of e4usa, agrees.

“We need more diversity among engineering students and also among engineering teachers,” says Klein-Gardner, an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University who has also taught high school courses part time for more than 20 years.

The world will be better served if the people learning, teaching and doing engineering see their pursuits through the lens of their own life experiences in various socioeconomic circumstances and their understanding of the needs of people in those environments, Klein-Gardner says.

She points out that partnering with high schools in disparate communities isn’t the only way e4usa is trying to ingrain different perspectives into engineering education. In some schools, the project’s curriculum is being used by those who teach different subjects — including history and music.

Demonstrating impact of STEM fields on arts and culture

Richard Maxwell, who developed and leads the Creative Musical Arts and Sciences program at Arcadia High School in the Scottsdale Unified School District, began teaching the e4usa curriculum in 2019. He sees an integral connection between music, science, engineering and technology.

“I tell my students that most of what they see and hear in their lives, on recordings, TV, movies, videos and websites, is about engineering,” Maxwell says, “There’s no escaping it. I think of music today as a STEM subject,” .

For e4usa curriculum assignments in which students construct their own instruments from common objects and materials, “they are essentially learning about engineering design and prototyping, along with some physics,” he says.

Aside from the technical elements and craftsmanship involved in making musical instruments, Maxwell asserts that engineering and science can also shape the experience of music from a cultural viewpoint.

What good engineering design can provide “produces the nuances and qualities of sound that make us listen to music, identify with it and connect to it emotionally,” Maxwell says.