> home
> About
> Contact Us
> Editorial Info
> IEEE-USA

03.10

To Win Over the Public, EWeek Uses 'Cool Factor'

By Robin Peress

Engineers Week, one of the foremost annual events spotlighting engineering’s vast and vital role in everyday life, unfolded this year from 14-20 February with a memorable lineup of activities and programs aimed at young audiences.

The schedule in Washington included the National Engineers Week Future City Competition, Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (to be followed by the Global Marathon in March), and Discover Engineering Family Day, featuring more than 25 interactive technology exhibits at the National Building Museum. Among the related special events were the awards ceremony for Future City Competition winners and an exhilarating Oval Office visit with President Obama, who led competition finalists in a chat via satellite with International Space Station and Space Shuttle Endeavour astronauts. In other news, EWeek bestowed recognition on several hand-picked 30-and-under engineers in the New Faces of Engineering program.

EWeek’s robust program of today belies its 1951 founding by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) as a small-scale endeavor to celebrate its members’ achievements. It did not become a coalition with a forward-looking mission until the late 1980s when NSPE reached out to other organizations for support in expanding its programs, thereby forming the National Engineers Week Foundation. In 1990, led by then honorary chairman Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., EWeek set its compass on a sweeping, proactive engineer-led outreach to schoolrooms to foster pre-college STEM education, where the future of the engineering pipeline lay. The umbrella name given to this incentive was DiscoverE. Today, through a wide range of entertaining hands-on activities, educational projects and awards programs, EWeek promotes the engineer as a creative and dedicated trailblazer of new technology, and helps steer students to an engineering career of their own.

Critical Mass

One of the greatest lessons EWeek can impart to schoolchildren is the need for teamwork in engineering, and nowhere is teamwork better personified than in the coalition of societies and corporations comprising the National Engineers Week Foundation. More than 100 member organizations share credit for bringing EWeek to the public, even though financial and administrative contributions vary, and all share the pride of nurturing future engineers or simply raising the public’s technical literacy. The coalition brings to mind the motto of Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers: “All for one and one for all.”

“The engineering profession needs to present more of a united front to effect real change,” says Foundation Executive Director Leslie Collins. “A coalition creates unity of purpose and delivery. Our approach gives us critical mass and helps us to move outside the engineering community to develop partnerships with key organizations like public television and national education organizations and movements.  To advance interest and participation in engineering, we must collaborate outside the engineering community.”

At IEEE-USA, Public Relations Manager Chris McManes makes a practical point: “It doesn’t matter who gets the credit. No one organization can do it by themselves.”

This combined leverage led to very welcome coverage when a Washington FOX 5 Morning News team came to the National Building Museum the day before Discover Engineering Family Day to broadcast live spots featuring several of the demonstrations that would be on hand the next day. McManes explained the workings of an “Electric Highway” and showed the difference between using conductive and nonconductive materials, while Nate Ball, host of PBS’s Design Squad, rode his dramatic vertical “Ascender” into the air. It was Family Day's most high-profile advance publicity, says McManes.

It didn’t hurt that Holly Morris, the reporter who interviewed McManes and Ball, was uniquely disposed to pitching an EWeek event. Morris holds a degree in civil and environmental engineering from Duke University, and favors showing the fun side of technology to kindle the public’s curiosity.

“Engineering gives you the tools to process a great deal of information, to do teamwork, to analyze things and to do problem-solving,” she says. “In every assignment I’ve ever had, my training came in handy.” But, she adds, engineers who want to grab a young person’s attention might get further by showing the ‘cool’ side of what they do, à la “regular guy” Ball of PBS, who has an M.S. degree from MIT and a company to promote his invention.

“The new trend is to show the world it’s cool to be smart. They need to stress the fun factor to get the lightbulb in a kid’s head to go on,” Morris says.

Adds Leslie Collins, “Engineering is innovative and creative. Our Discover Engineering Family Day is all about creativity and fun, and we get tremendous press.”

The combined impact of television, radio, print and outdoor promotion helped lead to a turnout of 5,340 people. In the words of one observer, parents and kids were “beside themselves with all the fun. I was thinking engineers got it goin’ on.”

Moments in the Spotlight

Even with partnership as the constant theme, many coalition members take the opportunity to serve as the honorary “lead society” each year. This role calls for the society to conceive and develop a legacy project, which is then adopted by the Foundation, and, it is hoped, will take root and blossom for years to come.  Some past examples include the 1999 collaboration between the American Ceramic Society and Eastman Chemical Company, which built a Web site, www.discoverengineering.org, for middle school students, teachers and parents. In 2002, ASCE and DuPont helped launch ZOOM Into Engineering with WGBH TV.

Even before these innovations, IEEE-USA made an indelible mark on EWeek when in 1993 it introduced the Future City Competition, with backing from Chevron. Pender M. McCarter, the organization’s senior public relations counselor, was the guiding force behind the idea for an engineering-design competition for middle-school students. The Future City Competition presents a challenge and requires 7th- and 8th-graders to summon their technical skills, problem-solving ability, three-dimensional model-building skills and writing, while demonstrating their ability to follow directions, to understand the relationship between people, structures and the environment, to exercise their creativity, and to cooperate as a team, aided by engineer-mentors — all to solve a real-world urban design problem, not just a “what-if.” Student participants get to walk in an engineer's shoes, so to speak, and find out how their contributions help society. Not only has this project been going strong for 17 years, thanks in good part to its early management by consultant Carol Rieg, but its impact has rippled far beyond the United States to include pilot programs as far away as Egypt, Sweden and Japan.

“Every local and national article we see about the National Engineers Week Future City Competition showcases the creativity of the engineers and students, from their big innovations in urban planning to their inspired use of recycled materials in their physical city models,” says Ms. Collins. “It is a great legacy from IEEE-USA’s 1993 role as chairing engineering society. Future City is really one of the only middle school engineering programs owned and adopted across the entire engineering spectrum.”

Anne Squire, director of operations for the National Engineers Week Foundation, calls Future City a “powerhouse program” that kids are passionate about. “IEEE-USA took their work to heart and ran with it. They’re a steadfast partner of the Foundation.”

Robin Peress is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. For more information, visit www.robinperess.com.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.