July 2006

Mentoring Children: Inspiring That First "Aha" Moment

By Glenn S. Tenney

Most of us have, at one time or another, been mentored and taught on-the-job. Some of us have also been "mentored" back in high school, middle school, or even grade school — an experience akin to that "aha" moment when you realized that this is what you enjoy and want to do when you grow up. What I want to do here is to ignite each of you reading this to do something in your community or your schools that might help share that "aha" moment with children so that they, too, can become engineers or scientists.

A huge difference exists between mentoring adults on-the-job and "mentoring" kids. It's important to do something to help kids want to be involved with engineering and science whether or not you call it "mentoring." It's a combination of mentoring, teaching, helping teachers and in general helping kids get excited about engineering and science — and to understand that it can be "cool" to do science "stuff." Your challenge, then, is: What can you do now that will get just one kid excited about science? Imagine "what if" that child wouldn't have gone into science or engineering. Remember what about science made your eyes light up when you were a kid.

Each grade level has different needs and represents different challenges. At the grade-school level, it's common for a class to have the same teacher throughout the year teaching a single group of students a broad curriculum from history and geography to math and science. At the middle-school level, subject areas tend to be taught by different teachers with a more specialized background, and even more so at the high-school level. Even though a science teacher might have 30 or 60 college-level units in science, they are not necessarily well trained in your specific field of expertise — which is where you come in.

Some schools encourage the parents to get involved with the classes, but schools rarely have enough parents involved who have science and engineering experience. Many schools also welcome members of their community to get involved even if they're not a parent of a child in the school. Contact a teacher or principal at a nearby school to see how you can be involved.

Some people think that "being involved" in mentoring school children means just coming in once a year to describe to a class what it's like being an engineer or scientist. While that's a good thing to do, it barely scratches the surface. First, the teachers at each grade level have very different needs, and their needs might not be satisfied by one visit a year. For example, a middle-school science teacher might have three or four different classes per day where they teach the same curriculum to each of class.

Think back to your first "aha" moment. Was it when you heard about what an engineer does? Or was it when you saw or participated in an experiment or science project? A hands-on experience, especially for children, is going to be a more emotional experience and will be remembered longer than just hearing a "career talk."

Depending on grade level, some examples of projects that children can experience — even if they just have to watch from a safe distance — might be:

• a thermos of liquid nitrogen (readily available at your local welding supply shop) and ask the children to tell you what they think will happen when you put a flower, a piece of paper or bouncy-ball into the liquid nitrogen

• switches, different color LEDs, resistors, and wire to show how basic electric circuits function

• magnets and iron filings

• lenses

There are dozens of ideas like these, and numerous foundations teach teachers how to do such simple and useful experiments. The teacher with whom you want to work might already have lesson plans for several great science projects and might appreciate having a real scientist or engineer help present it to their classes. [www.pa.uky.edu/~sciworks/intro.htm and www.science-house.org/middleschool/links.html].

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Contests are very popular with high-school students [www.usfirst.org/]. This type of project requires volunteers able to make a longer-term commitment than just a day or two a semester.

Another thing that you can do to help your local teachers at all levels is to talk with them and volunteer to be a knowledge resource — someone who the teacher can call or e-mail to discuss science and engineering. Teachers often know the material that they're going to teach and can do a great job teaching it, but their students often ask questions that they can't answer — questions that you might deal with every day at work.

The important thing is to talk with the staff at your local school to find out how you can help inspire that first "aha" moment in a young student about engineering and science. If you can do that, you've mentored a new scientist or engineer into the profession.

IEEE Mentoring Resources

The IEEE's Educational Activities Board is committed to providing quality educational resources for educators, parents, students, IEEE volunteers and the public through its Pre-University programs [www.ieee.org/web/education/preuniversity/home.html].

The IEEE and IBM have collaborated to launch a new Web site that combines interactive activities with information on careers in engineering. Tryengineering.org [www.tryengineering.org] is designed to educate a variety of audiences about the different engineering disciplines and the impact engineers have on society. Targeted toward teachers, school counselors, parents and students, TryEngineering.org lets site visitors explore how to prepare for an engineering career, ask designated experts engineer-related questions, and play interactive games. Tools for teachers include lesson plans and engineering projects as well as a list of student competitions and science and engineering-oriented summer camps. The site offers a searchable list of accredited engineering programs in the United States and Canada, and will be expanded to include programs in other English-speaking countries as well as Germany and France.

IEEE-USA's  Precollege Education Committee (PEC) seeks to effect improvements in the nation's quality of precollege education and to raise U.S. students' level of technological literacy by placing emphasis on precollege math and science courses. IEEE-USA's PEC Teacher-Engineer Partnership Award recognizes collaborative activities between K-12 teachers and technical professionals [www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/pec/t-e-partnership.html]. IEEE-USA's PEC also provides precollege education teacher grants [www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/pec/teacher-grants.html] and has produced a new careers brochure for 11-to-13-year-old students [www.ieeeusa.org/communications/ia/ia-06-23-06.asp].

Maker Faire 2006 One of the common childhood traits among many engineers was that we tinkered with do-it-yourself or hands-on science projects. O'Reilly Media Inc. publishes a magazine called Make (http://makezine.com/) that's dedicated to tinkerers of all kinds… from robots, to music, to cars, to arts and crafts. In April, the organization held its first Maker Faire (http://makezine.com/faire/), a cross between a science fair for adults and a science day camp for kids, with a bit of Burning Man (www.burningman.com/ ) plus an arts and crafts fair thrown in, too. Maker Faire is a great way to get kids of all ages together to find out how to create hi-tech fashion, program robots, get an RFID receiver working, make blinking-light projects, create cartoons and animation, build a $200 machine shop, laser engrave eggs, and more. There were adults and kids all learning and having fun — sort of a geek county fair. Here are some of my snapshots from the inaugural Maker Faire. Watch for these type of activities where you live — or see if you can arrange a small hands-on tinkerer day at your local school.

Glenn Tenney, CISSP CISM, is a former chair of IEEE-USA's Intellectual Property Committee, and is IEEE-USA's Career Policy editor. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.