Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
🎓 The first author is a student, at least 2/3 of the authors are students -Undergraduate, Master, Doctoral-; may include supervisor as one of the authors.
Outreach activities are an important and valuable approach to promoting engineering education and careers to young people. They provide an excellent way to show that engineering can be fun, challenging and rewarding. With some careful thinking, they can also be used to promote and develop spatial ability, a cognitive ability that is very important to engineering.
Exposing children to spatially challenging tasks can help them to develop spatial ability which can transfer to improved performance in mathematics and other STEM subjects that are foundational to engineering. In this workshop, we present a range of hands-on activities that can be used to both promote engineering education and careers to young people and expose them to spatially challenging activities, thereby achieving more through an outreach activity. The target age group for the workshop is 8- to 12-year-olds but a wider range of age groups will be discussed during the workshop.
The workshop will begin with a short outline of why spatial ability is so important to achievement in engineering education with reference to several research studies on the topic. We will then present three different outreach activities to participants that have been designed to expose children to engineering and to challenge them to exercise their spatial ability. These activities involve design thinking, problem-solving, 2D and 3D visualization and making and have been informed by an extensive review of the literature on this topic.
We include an active phase by dividing the workshop attendees into groups of four members and asking them to
explore a condensed version of one of the outreach/maker activities
list engineering attributes and programme outcomes that could be achieved through these activities
think critically about these activities in small groups and provide feedback on them – what is good, what could be changed and improved
Think of how they might adapt this activity, or something similar, to the age group or subject they teach themselves
discuss if they would deliver these activities or reach for something else during an engineering week for this age group
We finish the workshop by asking each of the groups to report back with a summary of their discussions under each of the above points.
