Using Information Technology for Nationwide Engineering Outreach to Middle-School and High-School Students: Assessing the Outcomes

摘要

This paper presents a description and comprehensive assessment of the West Point Bridge Design Contest-a nationwide, Internet-based competition that has provided an engaging introductory engineering experience to over 30,000 high-school and middle-school students in the past two years. We begin by outlining the challenge presented by the growing shortage of home-grown engineers in the United States. We review existing national engineering competitions and note their influences on the development of our contest infrastructure-a specially developed simulation software package and a web-based judging system. We briefly describe the implementation of the contest and present an assessment of the extent to which it is accomplishing its goals. The assessment results serve as the basis for conclusions about the viability of IT-enabled engineering outreach.