UT Austin Brings Engineering Education to High School Students and Teachers

OCTOBER 22, 2014

This fall, Engineer Your World, an innovative high school engineering curriculum created at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, announced it will reach 3,000 students in 77 schools across the country — up from 750 students in 23 schools in 2012 — marking a significant expansion in its effort to provide accessible, high-quality engineering education and better prepare U.S. students in STEM fields.

Engineer Your World includes a full one-year curriculum for students, as well as a summer training session at UT Austin for teachers who will instruct the course in their high schools. Developed four years ago by UT Austin faculty, Engineer Your World is part of the National Science Foundation-funded UTeachEngineering program, a collaborative initiative dedicated to developing leaders in the emerging field of secondary engineering education. The curriculum is designed to engage both teachers and students with hands-on, socially relevant design challenges. For example, in the course’s Systems Engineering unit, students build an aerial imaging system to capture imagery of a disaster zone, and in its Discovering Design unit, they design a pinhole camera for people with disabilities. …Continue Reading

$12.5 Million National Science Foundation Grant to Fund UTeachEngineering Program for Educators

SEPTEMBER 21, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas—The University of Texas at Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering, College of Natural Sciences and College of Education have been awarded $12.5 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to prepare educators to teach engineering to Texas high-school students.

“With this grant, the NSF is building on the university’s successful UTeach program to create a model for preparing high school engineering educators, that we call ‘UTeachEngineering,’” says David Allen, a chemical engineering professor and the principal investigator for the newly developed program. “Texas is one of just a few states aggressively pursuing year-long high school engineering courses, and the effort here will help define how other states approach engineering education in high school.” …Continue Reading