Center Activity III - Student Recruitment and Outreach Activities
Activity Director: Dr. Stephen Crown
Increasing the number of graduates in STEM programs will require encouraging and preparing underrepresented minority middle and high school students through outreach programs focused on STEM. This activity will focus its efforts on the Texas Pre-freshmen Engineering Program (TexPREP) and the Dual-Enrollment Engineering Academy (DEEA).
The proposed plan under the DoD grant is to maximize the effectiveness of the TexPREP program by supporting the development, implementation, and dissemination of a generalized fourth year TexPREP curriculum that delivers STEM content in a Challenge-Based Instruction (CBI) framework with challenges that impact DoD areas of interest. The curriculum will be developed around CBI challenges that impact DoD interests and applications in STEM. Thus, students will have knowledge of STEM applications in materials science, computer science, and the environment, to name a few fields.
This activity proposes to continue teaching the “Introduction to STEM” course for subsequent summers beginning in 2011 to students in the DEEA program at South Texas College (STC). Students enrolled in DEEA are local high school students who are concurrently enrolled in STEM courses at STC. The “Introduction to STEM” course will contain CBI challenges and applications associated with DoD areas of interest. Therefore, these activities continue promoting STEM pathways and supporting efforts that UTRGV and STC have been making to provide students opportunities to discover and pursue STEM careers.
4th Year Curriculum
- Introduction to Water Science: Study and Modeling of Local Watershed
- Systems Engineering & Problem Solving: Dynamic Modeling and STELLA Systems Thinking Software (ISEE)
- Computer Aided Design
- Career Awareness
- Three Additional Courses: Computer Programming (Game Make and LabView), Intro to STEM, and the third is TBA soon.