| Most of us
have, at one time or another, been mentored and taught on-the-job.
Some of us have also been “mentored” back in high school,
middle school, or even grade school — an experience akin to
that “aha” moment when you realized that this is what
you enjoy and want to do when you grow up. What I want to do here
is to ignite each of you reading this to do something in your community
or your schools that might help share that “aha” moment
with children so that they, too, can become engineers or scientists.
A huge difference exists between mentoring adults on-the-job and
“mentoring” kids. It’s important to do something
to help kids want to be involved with engineering and science whether
or not you call it “mentoring.” It’s a combination
of mentoring, teaching, helping teachers and in general helping
kids get excited about engineering and science — and to understand
that it can be “cool” to do science “stuff.”
Your challenge, then, is: What can you do now that will get just
one kid excited about science? Imagine “what if” that
child wouldn’t have gone into science or engineering. Remember
what about science made your eyes light up when you were a kid.
Each grade level has different needs and represents different challenges.
At the grade-school level, it’s common for a class to have
the same teacher throughout the year teaching a single group of
students a broad curriculum from history and geography to math and
science. At the middle-school level, subject areas tend to be taught
by different teachers with a more specialized background, and even
more so at the high-school level. Even though a science teacher
might have 30 or 60 college-level units in science, they are not
necessarily well trained in your specific field of expertise —
which is where you come in.
Some schools encourage the parents to get involved with the classes,
but schools rarely have enough parents involved who have science
and engineering experience. Many schools also welcome members of
their community to get involved even if they’re not a parent
of a child in the school. Contact a teacher or principal at a nearby
school to see how you can be involved.
Some people think that “being involved” in mentoring
school children means just coming in once a year to describe to
a class what it’s like being an engineer or scientist. While
that's a good thing to do, it barely scratches the surface. First,
the teachers at each grade level have very different needs, and
their needs might not be satisfied by one visit a year. For example,
a middle-school science teacher might have three or four different
classes per day where they teach the same curriculum to each of
class.
Think back to your first “aha” moment. Was it when you
heard about what an engineer does? Or was it when you saw or participated
in an experiment or science project? A hands-on experience, especially
for children, is going to be a more emotional experience and will
be remembered longer than just hearing a “career talk.”
Depending on grade level, some examples of projects that children
can experience — even if they just have to watch from a safe
distance — might be:
• a thermos of liquid nitrogen (readily available at your
local welding supply shop) and ask the children to tell you what
they think will happen when you put a flower, a piece of paper or
bouncy-ball into the liquid nitrogen
• switches, different color LEDs, resistors, and wire to show
how basic electric circuits function
• magnets and iron filings
• lenses
There are dozens of ideas like these, and numerous foundations teach
teachers how to do such simple and useful experiments. The teacher
with whom you want to work might already have lesson plans for several
great science projects and might appreciate having a real scientist
or engineer help present it to their classes. [www.pa.uky.edu/~sciworks/
intro.htm and www.science-house.org/middleschool/links.html].
The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)
Robotics Contests are very popular with high-school students [www.usfirst.org/].
This type of project requires volunteers able to make a longer-term
commitment than just a day or two a semester.
Another thing that you can do to help your local teachers at all
levels is to talk with them and volunteer to be a knowledge resource
— someone who the teacher can call or e-mail to discuss science
and engineering. Teachers often know the material that they’re
going to teach and can do a great job teaching it, but their students
often ask questions that they can’t answer — questions
that you might deal with every day at work.
The important thing is to talk with the staff at your local school
to find out how you can help inspire that first “aha”
moment in a young student about engineering and science. If you
can do that, you've mentored a new scientist or engineer into the
profession.
IEEE Mentoring Resources
The IEEE’s Educational Activities Board is committed to providing
quality educational resources for educators, parents, students,
IEEE volunteers and the public through its Pre-University programs
[www.ieee.org/
web/education/preuniversity/home.html].
The IEEE and IBM have collaborated to launch a new Web site that
combines interactive activities with information on careers in engineering.
Tryengineering.org [www.tryengineering.org]
is designed to educate a variety of audiences about the different
engineering disciplines and the impact engineers have on society.
Targeted toward teachers, school counselors, parents and students,
TryEngineering.org lets site visitors explore how to prepare for
an engineering career, ask designated experts engineer-related questions,
and play interactive games. Tools for teachers include lesson plans
and engineering projects as well as a list of student competitions
and science and engineering-oriented summer camps. The site offers
a searchable list of accredited engineering programs in the United
States and Canada, and will be expanded to include programs in other
English-speaking countries as well as Germany and France.
IEEE-USA’s Precollege Education Committee (PEC) seeks to effect
improvements in the nation’s quality of precollege education
and to raise U.S. students’ level of technological literacy
by placing emphasis on precollege math and science courses. IEEE-USA’s
PEC Teacher-Engineer Partnership Award recognizes collaborative
activities between K-12 teachers and technical professionals [www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/pec/t-e-partnership.html].
IEEE-USA's PEC also provides precollege education teacher grants
[www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/pec/teacher-grants.html]
and has produced a new careers brochure for 11-to-13-year-old students
[www.ieeeusa.org/communications/ia/ia-06-23-06.asp].
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