A simple workshop on project teams for secondary school technology and science teachers and their students

As a faculty member teaching in Engineering and Engineering Technology Programs, I was interested in finding simple ways to promote interest in these fields for middle school and high school students. I have attended a "Recruitment and Retention Strategies" conference supported by NSF to come up with some ideas. In addition, I have attended ASEE presentations on "Promoting ET thru K-12 projects" and I have been a reviewer of papers on this topic. I have visited many of the local high schools and given presentations during career days and also presented at our campus during open house activities, but I was looking for a different approach. Many of the projects such as "Project Lead the Way"¹ are great but they are quite involved and take a significant commitment. What I describe in this paper is a simple project that I used involving teachers and their students that I thought was quite successful. This project was easily manageable for a faculty member acting alone or with a few other faculty members. Some of the teachers and students involved in the project were from schools with large minority populations and as a result of this a small grant was obtained. As an incentive, the teachers received credit for the workshop and were given robotic equipment from LEGO MindStorms for their classroom that was used during the workshop.