Engineering a Bright Future : Volunteers Hope After-Hours Projects Will Get Kids Interested in Science as Career
Amid squeals of delight, kids cheer on their favorite teams at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Anaheim. But this isn’t baseball or football. It’s engineering.
At schools throughout Orange County, children meet once a week after class to build cars powered by rubber bands, to design earthquake-resistant towers and to make wind-powered vehicles called land yachts.
Competition is fierce, especially during land yacht races, in which teams of pupils, using a box fan as wind source, test their vehicles for speed.
Elaina Ruiz, 11, says she never knew engineering could be so much fun. Now she is even thinking about becoming an engineer when she grows up. Elaina’s role model is an unlikely looking 70-year-old engineer named George Westrom, who founded an organization called Future Scientists and Engineers of America (FSEA).
When Westrom attended a recent meeting of Elaina’s FSEA chapter at Patrick Henry School, Elaina sidled up to him and demanded to shake his hand. “You’re the man in the movie,” she said, referring to a 15-minute video featuring Westrom that is shown to new members.
Westrom, obviously delighted but unaccustomed to being treated like a celebrity, leaned over and shook hands with Elaina and her partner, Stephanie Dolney.
“The whole idea is to let the young kids get interested in engineering,” Westrom said. “Kids in the early grades are engineers, taking things apart, finding out how they work. By the time they get to junior high, most have learned to hate math and science.
“This program is all about kids really becoming engineers. They do real engineering projects. At the same time they are working elbow to elbow with engineers from industry, so we make for them role models, if you will.”
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In the fall, in recognition of Westrom’s work, he received the prestigious First Lady of California Award for outstanding volunteer service to the community. And this week--which is National Engineers’ Week--Westrom will receive an award from the Institute for the Advancement of Engineering. The award will be presented Friday at a banquet in Long Beach.
The primary objective of FSEA, according to Westrom, is to motivate young people such as Elaina to choose engineering or science careers. The nonprofit organization is especially interested in attracting girls and children from minority ethnic groups who traditionally have not been encouraged to study science and engineering, he said.
Westrom said he founded the organization because of a study he read two years ago predicting that unless more young people became interested in studying math and science, the United States was going to run out of engineers and scientists.
The study “concluded that in 10 or 15 years we wouldn’t have engineers graduating from schools because the pipeline was drying up and people were not going into it,” he said. “This is a very serious thing for our country. If we don’t have technologists, we are going to be a Third World country.”
Future Scientists and Engineers of America is patterned after Future Farmers of America, according to Westrom, and works on the principal that kids do better and are more interested in things that provide hands-on experience.
The organization helps bring kids in grades 4 through 12 together with industry mentors in after school programs. Since FSEA was founded more than a year ago, the number of chapters has grown from two to nearly 50.
More than 1,000 children in Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties have become members, and about 100 volunteer scientists and engineers have donated their time to organization. (More volunteers are needed, according to Westrom. To learn more, call (714) 774-5000, Ext. 6010.)
Members of FSEA meet weekly to work on engineering and science projects designed to be challenging but fun.
“We want to have the students experience firsthand many of the constraints facing engineers and scientists,” said Westrom, who is director of advanced systems development for Odetics Corp. in Anaheim. “Projects are selected to bring to the students the type of challenges that must be overcome before a new product comes to market. We encourage real world projects to communicate what the real world is about.”
A typical project for an elementary school team of two is building a land yacht or a small car powered by rubber bands. Projects for high school students include building an electric motor from magnets, designing an earthquake-resistant tower and making a mechanical frog.
“Kids are really excited about their work,” said teacher Patti Scriven, who works with the FSEA chapter at Patrick Henry School in Anaheim. “I had a lot more kids who wanted to be in the group, and I hated to turn them down, but I’m four over capacity now.”
Membership in each chapter runs between 20 and 30 children who work under the guidance of two volunteer mentors and one teacher. Jim Justus, a 58-year-old retired engineer, serves as a mentor for a chapter at Kraemer Junior High in Placentia.
“It’s a great program,” Justus said. “The more I am associated with it, the more I realize how much the kids enjoy it, and it benefits them. This past Monday when I was there, this one young fellow was talking to another and said, ‘Why can’t we have this everyday like we do our other classes?’ ”
Justus says the work he is doing will help inspire young people to become engineers and scientists.
“What got me interested in engineering was when I was very young (was) a teacher who used to do projects very similar to what we are doing now,” he said. “I was about 10 or 11, and we built something and it caused me to be interested. I believe the same thing, only more organized and sophisticated than what I did, would have an impact on the young people today.”
A recent project at Kraemer involved building a game board, and the children who participated surprised Justus with their creativity, he said.
“We have the board design laid out, but they have to put it together and define the game they play,” he said. “One boy put together something about phonetics. He would show an apple, then he would have the ‘A’ sound. I asked him why he did it, and he said he did it for his little sister, who was not in school yet.”
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To start an FSEA chapter, a school must have a sponsoring organization that is willing to provide volunteer mentors on an ongoing basis. “We are continually talking to companies about becoming sponsors,” Westrom said, “and it has been very easy. So far we’ve had no rejections. I get calls everyday from people who want to work in the program.”
A few of the organization’s sponsors include Southern California Edison, Rockwell International, Hewlett-Packard, McDonnell Douglas, Odetics, Toshiba, Unocal and the Department of Water and Power.
“We give the company the option of the school they want to sponsor,” Westrom says. “And it becomes a real partnership between the company and the school.”
For example, in Westminster, Westrom says, that Southern California Edison is sponsoring nine schools, and by the end of next year the company hopes to have chapters in every school in the district. “Our crazy goal,” Westrom says, “is to get chapters in every school in the country by the year 2000.”
The organization’s ultimate aim, he said, is to make the United States the leading nation in math and science. To do that, Westrom says, children need to stop viewing math and science as difficult subjects that should be avoided.
“Anything is hard if you are not excited and motivated about it,” he said. “I had a boy in one of the chapters ask me about engineering, ‘Isn’t that hard?’ he said. I said, ‘It isn’t as hard as what I see kids do on skateboards.’ He got a big grin on his face. He understood that.”
