Be an Engineer Workshop is our new outreach for elementary school age level students, replacing our Design Engineering Competition since 2001. This three-hour workshop is held on the Saturday before National Engineers Week (NEW) at the Providence Children's Museum, and serves as our public NEW kickoff event. It is a hands-on engineering workshop for kids to learn about five different engineering disciplines. Originally, eight stations were planned, but in reviewing the proposed stations with the Children's Museum Program Director, it was refined to only five stations.
Briefly, kids may rotate through the stations surrounding the room, learning about electrical engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and software engineering by doing hands-on activities with a female professional or student engineer as station manager.
In addition to the hands-on activities, there are three unmanned tables with displays on engineering. One by the entrance is on SWE, with various SWE engineering brochures they may take with them, membership packets and a presentation board displaying the events SWE-NESS has done. The other two tables are in the center of the room, displaying library books about science and engineering careers and two presentation boards. One presentation board is about building careers such as geotechnical engineering, architectural engineering, civil engineering, structural engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. Each of these has a slash folder with facts about the discipline on the front, with interviews from engineers in the fields inside. Information for these came from the Building Big pbs.org website. The other presentation board contains about fifteen one-sheet outlines on engineering disciplines giving information on the particular career, what that type of engineer does and some real-life examples. This information was taken from the discoverengineering.org website.
Upon leaving, the kids are given a National Engineers Week sticker and bookmark, ordered from the eweek.org website. Eweek brochures are also distributed to interested visiting adults, the museum staff and the participating libraries. As funding permits, a number of the first child participants also receive an engineering coloring book. Any bookmarks or stickers remaining at the end of the workshop are given to the museum for distribution during National Engineers Week. A set of bookmarks is also given to the participating libraries for distribution during NEW.
This new outreach program has been very successful, and well liked by both children and adults going through the museum. It has proven to be a great way to introduce engineering in a fun and interesting format to people of all ages!
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