Increasing engineering awareness through targeted outreach

Carnegie, Dale A.; Watterson, Craig; Edwards, Jason; Exley, Tim

doi:10.1109/educon.2011.5773126

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Dissatisfaction with this language, especially when it served as a first programming experience for many of the students, led us to adopt Scratch instead. A summary of the status of these outreach activities is presented in [8], using a PIC microcontroller and before the implementation of Scratch. Recent student survey responses from these activities have been exceptionally positive and comparable with those expressed in [8].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Topics include regional providers of tertiary engineering study (primarily VUW and WelTec), cool features of digital engineering, career advice, interviews with students and the profiling of interesting projects. For secondary school students and teachers, there is a page delivering advice and suggestions on the operation of VUW"s Arduino outreach boards 8 and a "Scratch" programming page with the trial programs that can operate on these boards. A sample page from this geek-oriented web site is illustrated in Figure 3.…”

Section: Figure 1 Covers Of Geek Engineering Promotional Bookletmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving Engineering Recruitment

Carnegie¹,

Watterson²

2012 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) is a new provider of Engineering in New Zealand and faces numerous challenges. These include a general ignorance of engineering amongst our secondary school students and very strong competition from established providers. Traditional marketing strategies have been unsuccessful in achieving the level of growth our programme requires. In collaboration with the regional polytechnic, Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), VUW undertook a major exercise to identify issues relevant to recruitment and retention in the "digital" engineering specializations. This paper considers the recruitment aspect of this project. Demographic studies indicate that our target audience strongly identify with being "geeks", something that no New Zealand tertiary training institute incorporates into its marketing strategy. In response, a novel website, hardcopy "geek hero" publication and clothing range was created. The publications have been extremely well received by secondary school students, teachers and career advisors. Informative and promotional posters have also been created for display in secondary school laboratories and classrooms. Whilst final enrolment numbers are not at this stage known, one indicator of the success of our initiatives can be seen in the unprecedented increase in preenrolment numbers. Overview The New Zealand Government acknowledges that the country does not produce sufficient numbers of engineering graduates. As a result, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) accepted its first students into a new Bachelor of Engineering degree in 2007. VUW has chosen to specialize in what we will generically label "digital" engineering. Specifically VUW offers Electronics and Computer Systems Engineering (a programme that includes several mechatronics courses), Network Engineering and Software Engineering. This "digital" label is not an accurate one, but will serve in this instance to differentiate these forms of engineering from (say) Civil, Mechanical or Chemical engineering. VUW is now the primary university provider of engineering in Wellington, New Zealand. It faces challenges in attracting engineering students given the specialized nature of its engineering offering (and poor student understanding of these specializations) and extremely strong competition from New Zealand"s two most established engineering universities, The University of Auckland and Canterbury University. Indeed, local secondary school engineering students have many decades of tradition of leaving the city, primarily for Canterbury in order to pursue their studies. This tradition is firmly in the mindset of parents, secondary school teachers and careers advisors. To help retain engineering students in the Wellington region, a partnership has been formed between VUW and the Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), the primary polytechnic engineering provider in the region. This partnership is non-competitive in that VUW offers a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) (a four year degree awarded with honors), M...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Figure 1 Covers Of Geek Engineering Promotional Bookletmentioning

confidence: 99%