Increasing Interests of High School Students to Engineering through Summer Education

摘要

With the strong support from Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Texas Southern University (TSU) hosts a National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI) since 2001 to education high school students for earlier preparations in engineering. Among the fantastic activities that STI prepares, the course "Intersection Signal Timing" is one of the representatives that are designed to illustrate that Engineering is all about creating, building, and making things better for our lives. An intersection within the campus is selected for students to collect traffic data, and a workable Excel spreadsheet together with the theoretical formulations embedded is distributed to students for their practices. Through the hand by hand instructions, the students are able to calculate timing parameters for intersections and present their recommendations in class. They are aware that becoming an engineer requires hard work and good educations.