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Summer Electrical Engineering Academy
The Summer Electrical Engineering Academy at The University of Tulsa for Precollege Students is a commuter academy that makes students aware of careers in electrical engineering through hands-on design projects, seminars, industry professional interaction, and company tours.
The faculty of the Academy includes professors from the Electrical Engineering Department at TU and several high school teachers. The teachers receive training prior to the academy and use this training to help students with the academy’s activities. Teachers also receive support to implement the academy exercises, or similar ones, within their classrooms. The Director is Peter LoPresti, (918)-631-3274 or peter-lopresti@utulsa.edu.
Objectives
Employment opportunities in science and engineering occupations are expected to increase through the end of the decade. However, there has been a declining trend in enrollment in undergraduate science and engineering majors at U.S. universities. In fact, the U.S. trails many other industrialized nations in the percentage of bachelor's degrees in science and engineering. A contributing factor to this problem is that engineering lacks a formal presence in K-12 education. As a result, many qualified students are unaware of career opportunities in science and engineering, and thus fail to pursue technical majors in college.
The objectives of our program are:
- To make students aware of engineering career opportunities through hands-on design projects, seminars, and tours of local companies.
- To train middle school and high school teachers in engineering related activities and provide support to the teachers in implementing academy exercises within the teachers’ classroom during the regular school year.
- To attract more Oklahoma students into engineering study to help meet Oklahoma technical employer needs.
- To illustrate the need for students to develop math and science skills to tackle challenging and interesting engineering problems.
2009 Summer Electrical Engineering Academy Information:
- Academy dates are July 6th – July 10th, 2009.
- Students entering grades 8 through 11 can apply.
- Teacher training will occur the week prior to the Academy.
- Commuter Academy: Students are dropped off between 8am and 8:30am, students are picked up about 4:30pm.
- The student application forms must be submitted by April 17th to be considered for the Academy. Forms
received after that date will be put on a waiting list in the order they are received.
- The teacher application forms should be submitted by May 1st to be considered for the Academy.
- Sponsored by OSRHE, so there is no cost for the Academy.
- A closing program open to family and friends is held on the afternoon of the 10th.
Example Activities
Communication and Team Building
The purpose of this activity was to explore the various ways that groups of people communicate and work together to arrive at a common goal. The first part of the exercise involved an ice-breaking game where the students were each given game pieces, a subset of the game rules, and basic instructions, and then had to put together the highest value hand possible. The students had to exchange information and communicate with peers, decipher conflicting rules, and plan a strategy for success.
Electric Car
The students explore the concept of resistor-capacitor (RC) circuits with respect to the application of powering an electric car. Students work in teams to build a small K’Nex car for testing purposes. The students then studied how quickly the capacitor charged through a circuit and discharged the capacitor through their car. The students then competed to see whose car would travel the
farthest on a single charge.
Digital Logic Activity
The students explore different aspects of logic circuits. Students construct a circuit to create logical inputs, and created another circuit to read logical outputs. They then explore the basic logic functions (AND, NOT, and OR) used in all computing, and the arithmetic of logical combinations, through examples and actually building circuits.
Professional Presentations: Each group creates a five-minute talk about one project or theme of the academy using PowerPoint. The students are given guidelines on good presentation practices and present their talks at the closing banquet with their families and friends as an audience.