Taste of Electrical Engineering workshops for high school students

Abstract

The School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications (EET) at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) initiated two workshops for Year 10 and Year 11 high school students, with a view to giving secondary school students a feel for electrical engineering, thereby encouraging them to consider tertiary study in this discipline. The workshops were run for three days each. Activities included introduction to EET laboratories, a design challenge, soldering, a competition and a field trip. This paper details the activities of these two workshops, the involvement of electrical engineering students and the impact of these workshops on the participating high school students. The results of the study indicate that the taste of electrical engineering workshops made the attitudes of high school students more favourable towards electrical engineering.