A pre-college recruitment strategy for electrical and computer engineering study

Numerous reports have called for improvements in U.S. STEM education, particularly in providing engineering experiences for pre-college students. Such experiences have the promise of producing more participants in the STEM workforce, and improving the overall scientific literacy of the American population. The authors have developed a summer high school camp for prospective engineering students which provides rigorous instruction and hands-on engineering tasks designed to solve everyday problems. The qualitative data collection involved 8 female participants' wiki pages, which provided nuanced insights related to social cognitive variables such as self-efficacy, science self-concept, and career goals. Students were able to improve their confidence, relate engineering principles to their everyday lives, learn about careers from working engineers, and increase interest in engineering careers. This preliminary analysis describes a replicable model for innovative engineering learning in an informal context.