"Catching Them Younger," Feature Article, May 2003

catching them younger

High school classes get kids interested in engineering; CAD teaches them problem-solving skills.

by Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor

Stacey Janssen has big plans for a young woman: She wants to design an amusement park thrill ride. She remembers exactly the class that started her down a path toward that thrill-seeking end. Surprisingly, the first time Janssen fired up a computer-aided design package wasn't as a technical-school or college student. She was introduced to CAD in a high school design class. And that class set her on a career path.

Over the course of the class, Janssen played with CAD and learned to create realistic objects. She liked what she saw and she liked the way she got there.

It's the closest thing to what something would look like if it were actually made, Janssen acknowledged. Her high school, Washington Township High School in Sewell, N.J., is part of the Partnership for Innovative Learning sponsored by the software company PTC of Waltham, Mass. Schools receive Pro/Desktop and Pro/Engineer CAD software from PTC through the program, which also includes course curriculum and teacher training.

Thanks in part to that course, she now plans to major in mechanical engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. The number of women pursuing engineering degrees is growing, although it's still small at the undergraduate level, according to statistics from the Women in Engineering Program at Pennsylvania State University.

"I think more young women would consider a career in engineering if they had an opportunity to study design in high school," Janssen said. "This would give them a chance to see that engineering is not just about math calculations. There are many aspects to it. They would also see that the stereotype about the field being only for men isn't true.
Women can handle and be successful in the field."

High school and middle school educators across the United States are taking a lesson from stories like Janssen's. If college-bound students don't have a way to learn about engineering before getting to college, they are not likely to choose engineering as a major, and a future engineer could be lost. To rectify that, many secondary schools are finding the money to implement engineering classes, which include CAD design instruction. By learning CAD early, students are better prepared for college engineering courses, high school instructors say. But there's an additional bonus, say proponents of the programs: Learning to design on a CAD system teaches students to think creatively, to ask questions, and to find answers to their own questions. There's no room for rote memorization in a high school engineering class.

Cheryl Bell, for one, wants to see more high school students harboring engineering inclinations. Engineering faces an uncertain future, she said. And statistics back her up. With more engineers planning to retire and a projected shortfall of students who want to train for those jobs, the numbers point to a future shortage of engineers in the United States. But Bell, who serves as Oklahoma state coordinator for the High Schools That Work program, is involved with a program called Project Lead the Way, which she says might just turn the numbers around.

Currently, 671 U.S. high schools, middle schools, and intermediate technical centers use the project's curriculum. The number of schools is growing all the time. One April day alone, the executive director added eight schools to the project's roster.

The nonprofit organization offers a pre-engineering curriculum, which high schools and middle schools can purchase, along with faculty training and the software needed for the classes. The people behind Project Lead the Way hope that, by teaching youngsters the fundamentals of engineering and training them on CAD and CAM software, it will foster a love of engineering in the students, some of whom will want to make a lifelong career of it, said Richard Blais, the executive director.

A NEW HIGH SCHOOL COURSE

In 2020, when Baby Boomers are almost all gone from the workplace, the United States will face an urgent need for more engineers and technical workers, Blais said. A larger number of engineers will be needed to replace colleagues hired in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the profession expanded significantly, who are now starting to retire, according to the engineering department at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Many university departments share that view.

According to the Engineering Workforce Commission in Washington, D.C., the number of bachelor's degrees conferred annually in engineering dropped from 77,892 in 1985 to 68,648 last year.

According to Blais, one way to solve that problem is to institute a new course of study in schools, pre-engineering. "We're finding when students are engaged in our curriculum, they're also doing better than they were before in reading, writing, math, and science," he said. "In our classes, they need to know mathematics and to read and write, and to work in teams and apply methods of science. And so, when they are in those other classes, they can say to themselves, 'Oh, that's why I need to know this stuff. I can see how I can use this stuff now.' "

Project Lead the Way, headquartered in Clifton Park, N.Y., is eight years old. But its roots go back to 1985, when Blais, who was then a school administrator in that city, called together 25 area business people, school deans, and organization and local government leaders to ask them to gauge a Clifton Park high school engineering curriculum.

"We told them we're going to be trying to change our curriculum to address the needs of our students in a world changing ever more rapidly every day and particularly impacted by technology," Blais said. "We told them that they're the people who receive our students when we're done. They should tell us what students should know or be able to do when we're finished with them."

The conversations eventually created Shenendehowa High School's pre-engineering program. Once the curriculum was worked out, other high schools wanted to climb on board. But the curriculum wasn't particularly adaptable, and the other schools didn't have the time to formulate their own extensive programs.

But in 1995 came a piece of good luck. One of the community advisors who just happened to lead a family foundation funded Project Lead the Way, so its curriculum could be pushed out nationally. Now, high schools and middle schools can implement the pre-engineering program and can train teachers to understand the technology used in the courses. A component for guidance counselors explains the national need for engineers and gives advice on how to help kids who want an engineering degree.

Through the years, the project kept its curriculum current and updated its technology. Students who know CAD and CAM programs before they enter a college or technical school can best keep pace with technological change, Bell said.

"Engineering is part of everything around us, and the changing pace of technology is evident," Bell said. "The study of engineering and technology in high school gives students an awareness of what engineering and engineering technologies are like. Engineering technology teaches real-world applications using problem-solving skills required in any business and industry setting."

The project negotiates software contracts with vendors each year. Schools lease software from the project. For CAD, the project uses Inventor software from Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif. Students learn CAM using Mastercam software from CNC Software of Tolland, Conn. For electronic design, students use Circuitmaker from Protel International Ltd. in Provo, Utah.

The retention rate of Project Lead the Way students who go on to engineering or technical post-secondary programs is higher than the national average, said Ed Hughes, a project coordinator.

One of the main cases of post-secondary student dropout is the students' lack of preparation for the rigor and depth of post-secondary work, Hughes said. Students interested in entering post-secondary schools that require them to study CAD or other technologies will be better prepared if they've had exposure at the secondary level.

PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS

High school teacher Timothy Jump said that youngsters who learn to design on CAD programs and who solve engineering programs in high school are thinking about and solving problems in a way they aren't able to in other classes. And the classes reach them at a vital time in their development.

"It's kind of a 'use it or lose it' thing," Jump said. "If you never use that part of the brain, those skills are gone and you can't go back to relearn them."

Jump teaches the Advanced Competitive Science Program to kids in grades 10, 11, and 12 at Benilde-St. Margaret's School in St. Louis Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. The six-year-old elective program was meant originally to include elements of biology and chemistry so kids could participate in science fairs, but it turned into a full-fledged engineering program. Now, instead of readying science projects, kids make robots. Students in the program compete in many of the popular national engineering design competitions, including FIRST. The event, "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," was founded by ASME member Dean Kamen. It is a competition in which teams of students and engineers build robots that compete against each other in a sports-style event. (FIRST was the subject of an article in the June 2002 issue of Mechanical Engineering, starting on page 46.)

As Jump sees it, a program like this focuses on exercising the problem-solving areas of kids' brains. "It's not like we hand the kids a kit and say, 'Build a robot from this,' " he said. "We say, 'We have a goal to build a robot that can put out a lighted candle; now go and do it.' That's why the momentum of this program has really taken off."

Many high school and middle school students take engineering courses.

The 65 students in Jump's program use SolidWorks
3-D CAD modeling software, from SolidWorks Corp. of Concord, Mass. New this year is a 3-D printer from Dimension of Minneapolis that creates a prototype part from information sent from the CAD system. Jump prints parts overnight. The new printer has saved him many a late hour. He formerly machined the prototype parts himself in the school's machine shop, where he spent from 12 to 15 hours tooling a part he knew wouldn't work. Not that he ever told the student who had designed the part that it wouldn't work.

"We want to give students the ability to come up with a solution and then follow through from design to prototype to testing the part," he said. "But part of the learning curve is allowing students to fail. When I went to the machine shop knowing I was making something that wouldn't work, there was a real tendency for me to want to say in advance, 'Look, this won't work.' Of course, I didn't do that."

The Dimension 3-D helps students experiment with design because the printer turns out parts overnight; kids have more time to make more prototypes. And they can see clearly why a particular prototype failed, Jump said.

"They made a little box to hold a computer circuit board, but they didn't support it, so when they started screwing it down, it fell apart," Jump said. "Then they went back and looked at the ribbing and the support inside plastic boxes and said, 'Oh, so that's what those are for.' I could see the learning process take off."

CAD ACROSS THE U.K.

Although CAD training is starting to catch on in North American high schools, it's already an established fact across the water in the United Kingdom, which boasts a new national design and technology curriculum.

Kumar Bhattacharyya, a professor at Warwick University in Coventry, England, and head of the university's Warwick Manufacturing Group, felt that children needed to learn CAD and CAM fundamentals before they get to college. In the late 1990s, he asked the UK Department of Education and Employment to expand the technology courses in schools to include CAD and CAM. The software maker PTC donated its CAD software to all 6,000 UK schools as part of the CAD in Schools Initiative, which officially kicked off in 2000.

Although the CAD project started as a way for students to use software simply as a design tool, founders soon saw it as a way to design electronic and mechanical components and even, in some cases, to do analysis on them.

Using the technology engages students in the creative process of designing and making products, said instructor Steve Herd. Students gather product and application information, discuss design ideas, and test a prototype of the product. In the process, they learn about technology's impact on society, Herd said.

Herd teaches at Theale Green School in Berkshire, England, where 10-year-old students design wristwatches with the CAD software before progressing to more complex designs. Most students go on to build the product using tools in the machine shop, including automated CNC milling machines. Some have even worked with local companies to sell their products for actual manufacture, Herd said.

The students start to think in three dimensions, he said. They conceptualize so much more.

Theale Green is a suburban school. Of course, the curriculum is also in place at inner-city schools, where it unites students who come from 40 countries and speak 37 languages, according to an instructor at one school, Martin Harvey. He is design and technology department head at the John Kelly Boys' Technology College in North London. Many of the school's 600 male students, aged 11 to 17, don't speak English well, he said.

The communication problem is one reason that Pro/Desktop has been so successful in the design and technology program, Harvey said. The program avoids English as a language. It's 3-D visual, and students can easily conceptualize their intent.

The bulletin boards at John Kelly are filled with 3-D designs for products like telephones, furniture, and stereo equipment, he said. More students stay in school at John Kelly than in the past, and Harvey attributes that to the design and technology program. He also credits the program with increased test scores. Before it was introduced, only 9 percent of the school's students met the national standards on the UK standardized test; now 69 percent meet standards.

Susan Staffin Metz is executive director of the Lore-El Center for Women in Engineering and Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. She has said that the engineering curriculum can be unappealing and is in major need of overhaul. Essentially, she believes that incorporating more exciting, relevant learning coupled with current technology earlier in a student's life would do wonders for retention of the best students, both male and female.

Many high school teachers say that the overhaul she seeks is happening today at the secondary school level.