Encouraging Female High-School Students Towards a Career in Electrical Engineering via In-Lab Participatory Learning: An Audio Electronics based Hands-On Example

Despite continued and numerous efforts by many, women remain underrepresented in electrical engineering. To help address this issue, an experimental summer program of duration 1-week was designed and implemented with the goal of encouraging young female high school students to enter undergraduate engineering programs. The program fits into a larger program organized by the College of Engineering and Women in Engineering and specifically was built around hobbyist electronics. The goal of this short summer program was to provide hands-on lab work that can be attempted at the high school level, leading to enthusiasm and confidence among female high school students. In this paper, we formulate our experience on delivering basic electronic engineering concepts to a small group of female high school students via an example hands-on project related to audio amplification. This work has been carried out as part of the community outreach educational activities at the Advanced Signal Processing Circuits (ASPC) lab. The paper will focus on the specific learning/teaching objectives, methods of delivery, equipment/components utilized, organization of specific activities and finally the methods of assessments and feedback. During the workshop, students were first introduced to the basic concepts such as voltage and current, electronic signals, terminology such as amplitude, frequency, the concept of signal amplification and attenuation, electrical resistance, capacitance. Each concept was carefully introduced with proper analogies from real world examples in order to make sure that the practical interpretation of these concepts is delivered in addition to conventional textbook definitions. Basic equipment such as the oscilloscope, signal generator and multi-meter were introduced and a simple audio amplifier circuit was constructed on a prototyping board using an integrated circuit and a variety of passive electronic components. Students were also trained to present their work at a poster presentation, where the project was ranked in the second place from more than ten candidate groups. An “active” poster was constructed by the students, where the circuit they constructed was part of the poster and anyone could directly plug in a hand-held device such as an iPhone and listen to the amplified output coming from an embedded speaker, which was also mounted on the poster. The involvement of graduate students in the lab during the workshop was effective in delivering the material and achieving the learning objectives as well as generating positive inspiration on the high school students in the area of electrical/electronic engineering. The paper will discuss these aspects in detail with assessment outcomes and conclusions of the program.