FEATURES
The Engineering Place
A successful outreach program—with a new name—brings NC State engineering to life for students and teachers.
Emma Brody and Ponni Theetharappian, a couple of bright nine-year-olds on a field trip, were sitting under the picnic shelter, munching on sandwiches and discussing—what else?—solar panels.
“I learned that solar panels can be used for a lot of different things,” Brody said of the day’s earlier activities. “You can use them to heat your room.”
“It’s so easy to change the world without polluting,” added Theetharappian.
Both students at Fuller Elementary School in Raleigh had spent the day learning about solar power as part of RAMP-UP, a program that brings NC State educators into elementary schools to teach kids about engineering, science, math and technology. On this day, the kids toured the NC State Solar House and visited the new solar farm at SAS Institute in nearby Cary, after which the kids settled down for lunch at the SAS picnic shelter.
RAMP-UP is just one of many programs that make up the Engineering Place, an outreach effort that aims to bring engineering to life for children and adults across North Carolina. Formerly called K-12 Engineering Outreach Programs, the Engineering Place is a unique program that reaches up to 10,000 undergraduates, graduate students and K-12 teachers statewide each year.
The goal: get more young people interested in engineering.
“We’re making more of an effort to let people know the breadth and depth of our offerings,” said Dr. Laura Bottomley, the Engineering Place director, “and one of the reasons to do that is that so many of the things that we do are linked with one another.”
Why is all this important? Because the influence of technology on society is increasing quickly, and it’s important for everyone to be able to understand how it works, Bottomley said. Furthermore, all that new technology has created a need for more engineers, including those who can bring forth new ideas to solve modern problems.
“We need different viewpoints,” she said, “because to solve the types of problems that we’re dealing with today, it’s going to take a different mindset than the type of mindset that created those problems.”
To do that, the Engineering Place has put together a unique collection of outreach programs. They include summer camps for K-12 students; programs that send undergraduates and graduate students into schools to work with elementary schoolers; training sessions for NC State engineering alumni who want to be volunteer teachers in their communities; and assistance for teachers who want to introduce engineering concepts to their young students.
With all those programs, the Engineering Place could conceivably be part of a child’s life from elementary school through graduate school. Students at Fuller Elementary, for example, can learn about engineering through the RAMP-UP program. When they get older, they can attend the middle- and high-school engineering camps at NC State. If those students attend NC State for college, they can help mentor K-12 students for four years—or even longer if they attend graduate school at NC State.
All the programs share a common goal of making engineering fun. In summer camps, the students build and race boats made of cardboard boxes; build brick walls and try to knock them down with golf balls; and drop balls of Silly Putty off an NC State library roof. Brody, Theetharappian and the other students in the RAMP-UP program got to check out an electric car.
These efforts, along with working closely with the College’s Women in Engineering and Minority Engineering Programs, have boosted engineering’s appeal among a broader group of students. African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos are traditionally underrepresented in the field, and women make up only about 20 percent of the undergraduate engineering population nationally.
But Bottomley has found that by running activities that research says appeal to those underrepresented groups, it benefits all students in the program.
“It turns out when you do those things, you make the program more appealing to everybody,” Bottomley said.
The Engineering Place is unique among engineering outreach programs because it is integrated with the College’s Office of Academic Affairs, which means that Engineering Place staff that work with K-12 students also interact with undergraduates and graduate students. That beneficial link results in older students mentoring younger students.
The program is also unique because of its partnerships. Its nationwide collaborators include the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering, and the program is also a testing ground for the Boston Museum of Science’s “Engineering is Elementary” program. The Engineering Place also participates in a Wake-County-wide effort to change the way science and math are taught in public schools.
“There are lots of reasons to get more and different types of people
interested in engineering,” Bottomley said. “From there, it’s
just a short step to what we’re doing at the Engineering Place.” 
More information at www.engr.ncsu.edu/theengineeringplace.