Building an Engineer Workshops
The Women’s Engineering Program and several departments within the College of Engineering of Cal Poly joined to offer outreach programs aimed at female Junior High and High school students on the central cost. The workshops hosted 90 students from Paso Robles to Santa Maria. Each student spent the day rotating through three engineering labs taught by engineering faculty and student assistants.
The first workshop was held in November of 1998 with a manufacturing engineering lab where students learned and built an air-motor (shown below), a civil engineering lab where students mixed and poured concrete bricks, and a mechanical engineering lab where students experimented with pulleys and motors. Each student left with a greater understanding of engineering and an excitement for the profession.
The second workshop was held in May of 1999 and introduced students to engineering through several games and laboratories:
- An Industrial Engineering game demonstrating reliability problems in a manufacturing environment,
- A Materials Engineering lab where students examined materials by braking metal bars both before and after heating,
- A Computer Engineering lab where students developed web pages, and
- A Mechatronics Lab.
The last lab was designed to introduce them to "Mechatronics", an interdisciplinary discipline in Engineering. The students were asked to form teams to build a smart car which is documented at http://www.calpoly.edu/~ie/mech/smartcar/intro.html. A picture of "Smart Car" is shown below.
The satisfaction for all involved as expressed in the following comments from the student participants:
- "The activities really made me think and helped me to see what a real life engineering assignment is"
- "I loved the activity because I got to see it work."
- "It was exciting."
- "I liked getting messy."
- "I liked breaking things."
- "I learned a lot and it was neat and fun."
Pictures show the workshop participants, activities that were designed for them, and Cal Poly students working with junior-high and high school students in Cal Poly's laboratory environment.
Organizing and offering these workshops was a lot of work for everyone who was involved. Partial Funding was received from the Society of Manufacturing Engineering. Seven faculty members volunteered their time along with about 50 student assistants. The faculty members who were involved with the design and offering of these workshops were:
- Sema E. Alptekin, Prof. and Chair, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department
- Ken Brown, Professor, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department
- Mary Cooper, Lecturer, mechanical Engineering
- Mei-Ling Liu, Professor, Computer Science
- Liz Schlemer, Lecturer, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department, and former Director of Women in Engineering Program
- Jeffrey Sczechowski, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Linda Vanasupa, Professor, Material Engineering
The workshops were very successful. The satisfaction of doing something useful for young students was worth the trouble. We believe that we were able to stimulate their interest in engineering since many of the participants of these workshops want to come back to Cal Poly for another workshop. We are looking forward to having them enrolled in our engineering program in the coming years.
