RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students

Jiahui Song; Gloria Guohua Ma

Download Paper | Permalink

Conference: 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Publication Date: June 23, 2018
Start Date: June 23, 2018
End Date: July 27, 2018
Conference Session: Women in Engineering Division Technical Session 6
Tagged Division: Women in Engineering
Page Count: 11
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--30913
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/30913
Download Count: 385

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Jiahui Song Wentworth Institute of Technology

visit author page

Jiahui Song received her B.S. in Automation and M.S. in Pattern Recognition & Intelligent Systems from Southeast University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Old Dominion University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Technology at Wentworth Institute of Technology.

visit author page

biography

Gloria Guohua Ma Wentworth Institute of Technology

visit author page

Gloria Ma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Technology. She has been teaching robotics with Lego Mindstorm to ME freshmen for several years. She is actively involved in community services of offering robotics workshops to middle- and high-school girls. Her research interests are dynamics and system modeling, geometry modeling, project based engineering design, and robotics in manufacturing.

visit author page

Download Paper | Permalink

Abstract

RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students

RAMP is a six-week, summer bridge program at our institute to help students explore STEM careers and navigate the transition from high school to higher education. Over the past years, RAMP has helped introduce over 150 youth to college life by connecting them with peers, enabling them to participate in skills-based workshops and hands-on projects, connecting them to alumni and other industry mentors, and helping them to become immersed in campus life prior to the start of their freshman year of college. In recently two years, more women students are recruited to the program, a unique mini program “RAMP for High School Girls” is designed to introduce them to the STEM field.

RAMP for High School Girls program has 6 different workshops: Biomedical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Industrial Design. Each weekly workshop takes two days, 2 hours a day. The following topics are introduced to students by instructors from different departments: overview of field and major, faculty own experience in the field and teaching, career options within major/field, and hands on activity that related to field. The main goal for this program is to expose students to the various STEM disciplines.

The objective of this research is to measure the impact of these workshops on the students’ affective and learning experience. Mechanical and Electrical workshops are used to do this research. The Mechanical labs are: Heat Engine and Tensile Test; while Electrical engineering workshop includes Pulse Width Modulation and Arduino Pulse Width Modulation.

An entrance survey and an exit survey were conducted to collect data right before and after students completed the projects to evaluate the content of the workshops. There are 32 female students participated in the RAMP for High School Girls Program in the past two years. The survey shows 6.3% students think they know some/a lot about Electrical Engineering before the workshop, while 56.3% of the students think they know some/a lot about Electrical Engineering after the workshop. 6.3% students think they know some/a lot about Mechanical before the workshop, and 59.4% students think they know some/a lot about Mechanical Engineering after the workshop. More data will be analyzed to see preferences of students for workshop contents. Students reflected that they enjoyed the experience very much, and found the workshops to be extremely helpful in helping them to further identify their college interests and majors.

Citation
Format

Song, J., & Ma, G. G. (2018, June), RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30913

TY - CPAPER
AB - RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students

RAMP is a six-week, summer bridge program at our institute to help students explore STEM careers and navigate the transition from high school to higher education. Over the past years, RAMP has helped introduce over 150 youth to college life by connecting them with peers, enabling them to participate in skills-based workshops and hands-on projects, connecting them to alumni and other industry mentors, and helping them to become immersed in campus life prior to the start of their freshman year of college. In recently two years, more women students are recruited to the program, a unique mini program “RAMP for High School Girls” is designed to introduce them to the STEM field.

RAMP for High School Girls program has 6 different workshops: Biomedical, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Industrial Design. Each weekly workshop takes two days, 2 hours a day. The following topics are introduced to students by instructors from different departments: overview of field and major, faculty own experience in the field and teaching, career options within major/field, and hands on activity that related to field. The main goal for this program is to expose students to the various STEM disciplines.

The objective of this research is to measure the impact of these workshops on the students’ affective and learning experience. Mechanical and Electrical workshops are used to do this research. The Mechanical labs are: Heat Engine and Tensile Test; while Electrical engineering workshop includes Pulse Width Modulation and Arduino Pulse Width Modulation.

An entrance survey and an exit survey were conducted to collect data right before and after students completed the projects to evaluate the content of the workshops. There are 32 female students participated in the RAMP for High School Girls Program in the past two years. The survey shows 6.3% students think they know some/a lot about Electrical Engineering before the workshop, while 56.3% of the students think they know some/a lot about Electrical Engineering after the workshop. 6.3% students think they know some/a lot about Mechanical before the workshop, and 59.4% students think they know some/a lot about Mechanical Engineering after the workshop. More data will be analyzed to see preferences of students for workshop contents. Students reflected that they enjoyed the experience very much, and found the workshops to be extremely helpful in helping them to further identify their college interests and majors.

AU - Jiahui Song
AU - Gloria Guohua Ma
CY - Salt Lake City, Utah
DA - 2018/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - RAMP: Summer Bridge Program for Female High School Students
UR - https://strategy.asee.org/30913
DO - 10.18260/1-2--30913
ER -