Improving engineering awareness of secondary school students

In the middle part of the last decade the authors observed a downward trend in the number of students choosing electrical engineering courses in Victoria. This trend was evident across all of the engineering disciplines in Victoria. This trend was exacerbated over the past decade by a reduced number of students studying engineering pre-requisite and enabling subjects at year 12. This result combined with the fact that the national demand for engineers exceeded graduate supply, led to a shortage of engineers. The report by King (2008) into the supply of engineers for the 21st century made a number of recommendations relating to an attempt to increase the supply of engineers. This paper discusses some strategies for improving the awareness of engineering as a career amongst the secondary school student population. How can the introduction of engineering experiences through Physics in secondary schools improve the interest in engineering careers? Note the word 'Physics' refers to Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) subject. A group of Swinburne academics engaged with a number of VCE Physics teachers to collaborate and determine a suitable approach to improve the awareness of studying engineering at University. A number of discussions and a consultative debate led to the development of a learning resource kit. The VCE teaching staff using the kits were then surveyed to determine their effectiveness. The kits are being used in a number of secondary schools. As the study is not finalised, we anticipate that the results will show that this strategy is effective. This is backed up by the positive feedback from the VCE physics teachers as well as the survey results of the teacher's opinions. The learning resource kit has contributed to increasing the awareness of the connection between electronics and physics, by providing VCE physics teachers and students with what we consider to be excellent resource to facilitate an exciting and interesting approach to learning Further Electronics. We believe that this activity has encouraged more students to consider studying electronic engineering at University. We have shown a model which we believe is successful in improving the pathways to engineering from secondary schools using a 'hands-on' activity as the motivator. We recommend that Engineering staff in Universities should develop similar partnerships with physics teachers to increase the students' awareness of engineering as a possible career choice and thereby improve the pathway. On the whole the project has achieved the majority of its aims well or very well and some aims partially.