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Formerly known as the Engineering Education Advocate
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Engineering Graphics Teacher's Guide |
Aeronautical Engineering Teacher's Guide |
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Civil Engineering Teacher's Guide |
Teaching Engineering Made Easy: A Friendly Introduction to Engineering Activities for Middle School Teachers |
The Musical Engineer: A Music Enthusiast's Guide to Engineering and Technology Careers |
The Fantastical Engineer: A Thrillseeker's Guide to Careers in Theme Park Engineering - Second Edition |
High Tech Hot Shots: Careers in Sports Engineering |
Is There an Engineer Inside You?: A Comprehensive Guide to Career Decisions in Engineering |
The NASA Problem
Last October I had the privilege of seeing the Space Shuttle Discovery launch at Banana Creek in Florida. In exchange for this treat, I attended an all-day educational conference hosted by NASA. NASA is working to build a rocket to go to the moon. On the moon, they want to build a launch pad to go to Mars. That's a lot of engineering! This will require Astronauts to spend up to six months at a time on the Moon. However, there is concern that kids aren't interested in the space program. Most people don't even know about NASA's future plans.All day, I listened and everyone exchanged ideas about the best ways to address the problem. I hope they follow through on even half of the ideas provided.
Last week, I visited the NASA AMES facility at Moffett Field in California. The AMES facility has the largest wind tunnel in the US (and maybe the world). It's 80' x 120' and has it's own power grid so they don't give regular brown-outs to the local neighborhoods (it is estimated that the wind tunnel uses something close to $1000/minute in electricity!) Engineers and scientists are doing absolutely fantastic work at AMES! However, what struck me as odd was the gray landscape. As I was driving through the campus I saw very flat and rectangular buildings with drab exteriors. The buildings looked very old, there was no color and the environment was extremely structured. You'd never know anything exciting was going on and you'd never know that anyone doing exciting work was inside.
At the NASA conference last October, one of the ideas to recruit was to offer tours of the different facilities. If I were a kid that watched TV, surfed the Internet and enjoyed seeing color, I'd have no interest in working there. When we are young, it's very rare to choose a career where all the excitement of working is cerebral. Middle school students often choose careers based on who they know, how it looks and how they think it will make them feel. They want to see themselves in the role (especially girls). In the NASA case described above, a student might be better off visualizing themselves in the rocket engineer role from books, clips of Apollo 13 or the The Right Stuff and the Discovery Channel instead of actually visiting the research facility. At least until they are older and more secure in their decisions.
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Posted by Celeste Baine on April 30, 2008
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