UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS TEACHING CHILDREN: K 8 OUTREACH WITHIN THE CORE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

Outreach teaching is successfully implemented as a final project in core courses at UC Berkeley within the Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering curricula. These activities have been ongoing since 1997. These courses include Mechanical Behavior of Engineering Materials, Polymer Engineering, and Introduction to Biomaterials Science. These final projects entitled “How Things Break,” “Fantastic Plastic”, and the “Human Body Shop” have been presented to children at the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS), which is the public science center/museum at the University of California at Berkeley. A recent example, which will be described in this paper, is from a course entitled Structural Aspects of Biomaterials offered to junior and seniorlevel undergraduate students at UC Berkeley. The students who take the course are traditionally split between the Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering programs. For the past two years, the final project has been to design an exhibit for the Lawrence Hall of Science, based upon topics learned in lecture. These topics vary from specific medical devices (replacement heart valves, total joint replacements) to engineering issues (fatigue and fracture, viscoelasticity). Working in teams, the students research various aspects of their topics and develop lesson plans for the exhibit. In addition to primary lectures by University faculty and researchers, the students receive instruction from LHS science educators and exhibit designers on current practices in communicating science to children and the public. On the exhibit day at LHS, the student teams present activities and demonstrations of their chosen topics as well as ageappropriate literature and assessment activities designed to measure the children’s learning to a target audience of LHS visitors, children ranging in age from 4 to 5 grade who visit the museum. This final project has enormous potential for learning for both the undergraduate students and the younger children. The undergraduate students are given the unique experience of determining how engineering lessons can be most effectively presented while the younger children are exposed to interesting engineering research and applications in a format that is designed to attract and hold their attention. The lively interaction between undergraduates and the visiting children is a rare opportunity for a diverse group of youth to interact with University students, encouraging the children’s interest in pursuing science and engineering as future educational objectives. The goals for this project are described in greater detail in this paper, along with the basic requirements and outcomes.