Conducting K-12 Outreach to Evoke Early Interest in IT, Science, and Advanced Technology

Abstract
The Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute has engaged for several years in K-12 Education, Outreach and Training (EOT) events related to technology in general and computing in particular. In each event we strive to positively influence children’s perception of science and technology. We view K-12 EOT as a channel for technical professionals to engage young people in the pursuit of scientific and technical understanding. Our goal is for students to see these subjects as interesting, exciting, and worth further pursuit. By providing opportunities for pre-college students to engage in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) activities first hand, we hope to influence their choices of careers and field-of-study later in life. In this paper we give an account of our experiences with providing EOT: we describe several of our workshops and events; we provide details regarding techniques that we found to be successful in working with both students and instructors; we discuss program costs and logistics; and we describe our plans for the future.
Description
This is a preprint of a paper presented at XSEDE '12: The 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, Chicago, Illinois.
Keywords
K-12, education, outreach, training, EOT, STEM, children, workshops
Citation
Kristy Kallback-Rose, Kurt Seiffert, Danko Antolovic, Therese Miller, Robert Ping, and Craig Stewart. 2012. Conducting K-12 outreach to evoke early interest in IT, science, and advanced technology. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment: Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond (XSEDE '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 55 , 8 pages. DOI=10.1145/2335755.2335853 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2335755.2335853
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Type
Preprint