One asset to our organization is our outreach program (EFL)² , “Engineering Exploratory for Latinos from Latinos” (2 E’s, 2 F’s, and 2 L’s). This after-school program is hosted at Cardinal Valley Elementary School, a school with a 76% Hispanic population and 91% of students qualifying for reduced lunch. In this program, we introduce 5th grade students to a new field of engineering each week (Mechanical, Civil, Electrical, etc.) and then do a specific engineering-related activity with them. We will be awarding all the students with medals that read “Little Engineer” at the end of the year at graduation. In order to measure the success of this program, we will be performing a pre- and post- questionnaire video where we ask every student the following questions at the first meeting:
- “What is engineering?”
- “Where do we see engineering?”
We then re-ask them those same questions during our last session, hopefully receiving more insightful answers the second time around.