UAH Engineering Students Reach Out to High Schoolers

Engineering students at UAHuntsville are reaching out to high school students in an effort to encourage student in higher education and to support engineering and the sciences as high school classes.

UAHuntsville is a part of a group allied with A&M to support the local high schools in engineering education. This program is a part of a larger state wide initiative called the Engineering Acadamey Initiative for Alabama or EAIA, in which approximately 24 high schools participate. The chapter that UAHuntsville and A&M are in charge of is called the North Alabama Engineering Academy or NAEAA.

NAEAA has ten high schools enrolled in the program. The classes that are provided at these schools are considered pre-engineering classes and are taken as electives. The schools that participate in the program adhere to college level ABET standards and in some cases the schools adhere to the standards from kindergarten to 12th grade. This standard is applied with the expectation of better educating the enrolled students.

Dr. Brian Landrum, a faculty engineering ambassador for UAH to Bob Jones and Athens High Schools, explains, “What we’re trying to do is facilitate these programs to help promote and supply training, teachers, and learning material.” There is approximately one faculty ambassador at UAHuntsville, or point of contact, per high school enrolled in the program. UAHuntsville was awarded a grant to help nurture this endeavor and make it a reality. The faculty and students that are involved began many projects to bring to the schools new classes. Lego NX robotics kits and Carnegie Melon Curriculum cds have already been delivered to the schools while other projects are still being developed. Dr.s Leonard and Bardot are two other active faculty ambassadors in the program.

One of those projects that many UAHuntsville undergraduates have worked on is an initiative to provide desk top wind tunnels to the schools. Tiffanie McCutchen and Josh Smothers designed and built a prototype of the desktop wind tunnel. James Davis also helped develop the test section and obtain early flow measurements. Tiffanie and Josh are now working on developing experiments for the schools to perform while Micah Laughmiller will take over fabricating the rest of the wind tunnels.

“The high schools get to paint the wind tunnels whatever color that they want.” Dr. Landrum explained. He hopes that high school students could utilize the same equipment as college students. Dr. Landrum continued, “We would like to make this as an ongoing program. To get [college] students involved.” He explained how he hoped that current engineering students would get involved to mentor the high school students and do experiments together. Currently, UAHuntsville is co-sponsoring a tour to Boeing for the active participants in the program.

Mrs. Brenda Terry is the Special Projects and Outreach Coordinator for the UAHuntsville Institute for Science Education and makes this program possible. She manages the logistics and deals with the day to day administration of the program. She has set up training in March to teach retired engineers to serve as mentors to the students.

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