This paper presents an outreach program that targets students in high school. The program is designed to be fun, hands-on, and interactive, while introducing educational building blocks that will prepare students for careers in computer engineering. Key concepts introduced to students include logic design, hardwaresoftware interface, simple circuit design, robust design practices, and teamwork. An adaptation of the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is the platform on which this program is built. Teams of students construct dance pads from arts and crafts materials and aluminum foil. They also design and implement a scoring circuit based on Boolean logic, using logic gates on a solder-less breadboard. The scoring circuit is then interfaced with a preprogrammed micro controller and graphical user interface to complete the DDR design. Using DDR as a platform allows students to conquer several design challenges including building reliable dance pads and designing logic for a scoring circuit. The program was used three times during engineering summer camps hosted by the Minority Engineering Program and Women In Engineering Program at Purdue University in 2009. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from the students that participated.Index Terms -Computer Engineering, Pre-College Outreach, Logic Design, Game Development.
MOTIVATIONThere is a general consensus among professionals and educators in computer engineering that the future will require an increase in the number of educated workers in computer related fields. Current enrollment in education is not at a sufficient level to supply the number of professionals needed [1] [2]. Along a similar vein, most computer related professions and educational environments are lopsidedly male and non-minority [3]- [5]. These problems are both large and complicated, but similar in that they both require attracting people to computer engineering. This paper presents an outreach program for high school age students designed to attract them to the field of computer engineering. This paper first describes the details of the project and then describes an implementation of the project that took place at Purdue University.