This year, professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) initiated two new programs bringing pre-college electrical engineering education to underserved high school students in Tennessee.
Sometimes, that involves encouraging high schoolers to consider college education for the first time.
“The majority of the underrepresented or underserved students I have talked to wanted to help their families (by working) directly after high school, without exploring a wider scope of opportunities,” said EECS Professor Kevin Bai.
Associate Professor Dan Wilson’s three-day camp on a working farm in West Tennessee and Bai’s one-day workshop at the University of Tennessee’s urban Knoxville campus illustrate that faculty can harness many effective approaches to achieve UT’s land grant mission—and make a profound impact in high school students’ lives.
Learning a Field Engineering Mindset
When Wilson applied for a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant from the US National Science Foundation, much of the proposal was devoted to pre-college engineering education.
When he received the CAREER grant in 2021, he collaborated with UT’s Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development to identify the best place to start. That is when he learned about Lone Oaks Farm, an outdoor learning center and working farm that UT operates in West Tennessee. At the time, the farm was looking to expand its science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) offerings.
“In rural areas like West Tennessee, people are very focused on agricultural careers, which is good for a lot of people,” Wilson said. “However, it’s important to increase STEM participation for people who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to other options, like careers available in electrical engineering, which they could benefit from.”
Wilson initially envisioned a camp focused on computer work, such as the modeling of neuronal activation that he conducts in his lab. A camp development summit with Lone Oaks staff showed him the importance of integrating the physical environment of the farm.
“There’s a lot of equations and mathematics in what I do, but having something that students can go look at and physically see and work with is very impactful,” he said. “Part of making this camp work was trying to figure out how we can move things off the computer and introduce them to some ideas of modeling applied into the real world.”
Wilson and the Lone Oaks teaching staff identified a modeling problem that was immediately relevant to the farm: flood mitigation.
“If there’s a lot of rain, they have various parts of the farm that will flood, and there’s a lot of things that they have to do in order to respond to that,” Wilson said.
During a three-day weekend camp this summer, 12 high school students from West Tennessee high schools stayed at Lone Oaks Farm learning about predictive modeling and practicing looking at the world through the eyes of an engineer.
On a guided tour of the farm, the students were tasked with identifying areas of water access and potential threats they saw on the property. They learned basic statistical methods and plotted the farm’s stream level and rainfall using historical data from the West Tennessee River Basin Authority.
Wilson then introduced them to the deeper questions engineers investigate.
“The goal was to put together an early warning system based on that data,” Wilson said. “How would they build a data driven model in order to predict flooding? And how is that related to some of the things that they’ve seen in their studies in high school?”
Beyond discussing these ideas, the students also got to recreate some of the farm’s topography—and model some of their ideas for flood mitigation—on a stream table.
Wilson plans to host another three-day camp at Lone Oaks in the spring of 2025. He also hopes to develop a shorter version of the program for high school day trips.
“I hope it provides them with a lasting memory of science that they wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to through high school,” Wilson said. “I hope it taught them that there’s a lot of interesting careers in mathematics and science, and maybe gave them a push towards questions and options that they may not have considered otherwise.”
Discovering the Many Paths to Power Engineering
On September 6, 2024, 10 students from Lenoir City High School came to UT’s Knoxville campus for an all-day workshop about power engineering and the impact an engineering degree can have on a person’s life.
The workshop was an extension of a $5 million project that Bai, Chancellor’s Professor Leon Tolbert, Associate Department Head and Professor Daniel Costinett, and several industry partners have undertaken to improve the size and integration of motor drive trains for electric vehicles (EVs).
Their research is sponsored by a three-year grant from the US Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO), which also emphasizes the promotion and adoption of EVs in underserved communities.
“EVs are still relatively expensive, especially for people in underserved communities,” Bai said. “We wanted to let these students know effort is being put on reducing the costs of EVs and that, more importantly, EVs save money over gas cars in the long run.”
Bai and his co-investigators prepared a series of speakers and activities that they hoped would inspire the selected students to consider careers in electrical engineering.
“In the beginning of their visit, we found out that most of these students had had little knowledge of how an engineering degree, or any college degree, could change their lives,” Bai said.
Much of the workshop focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the industry—an important topic generally and one of personal relevance to the high schoolers, most of whom were Hispanic. One of the speakers was UT postdoctoral fellow Anwesha Mukhopadhyay, who shared her experiences earning degrees in power electronics, focusing on aspects of DEI. Later, a panel of professionals and current students in the field discussed their work, challenges, and the importance of DEI in electrical engineering.
The high schoolers also got to observe UT students conducting research at the Center for Ultra-Wide-Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT) and learn about Bai’s work on the EV drive trains.
Bai is looking forward to hosting the workshop again every fall during the VTO grant and expanding it to include students from other high schools. The value of the workshop was clear when, as the students prepared to head home, Bai asked how many of them now wanted to pursue a college degree.
“A majority of them raised their hands,” Bai said.
Contact
Izzie Gall (865-974-7203, egall4@utk.edu)