Dozens of local high school students will be welcomed on Elon University's campus Feb. 23 to compete in Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathemathics and Science, a competition coinciding with National Engineers Week.
"This is an opportunity for high school students to explore engineering and decide if they want to pursue it in college or for a career," said Sirena Hargrove-Leak, an engineering professor at Elon and the main faculty sponsor of the event.
The competition itself will consist of two exams that students will complete in teams of five to eight. The first will challenge students to solve some kind of engineering design scenario in which they must choose the best solution from multiple choices. The second will be a more open-ended design, where students will not have solutions to choose from. Teams will have to work together to find the best solutions for each, according to Hargrove-Leak.
Participants for the competition come from high schools in the Alamance-Burlington School System, as well as Caswell, Orange and Guilford counties.
Hargrove-Leak decided to bring the TEAMS competition to Elon when she received an e-mail from one of the many professional engineering organizations that she is involved in asking for universities and local companies to host the competition. She noticed that the only two other locations for competition in North Carolina were East Carolina University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
"I noticed there was a huge void in central North Carolina, so I saw this competition as a huge opportunity to bring engineering to students in our area," she said. "With budgetary constraints in local school systems, they don't have the capacity to travel as far as ECU or Charlotte."
The primary goals of a competition like the TEAMS are to both introduce students to engineering and raise awareness of it at a broader local and national level.
"It helps their peers become more awakened to the math and sciences and it awakens the schools of the need to be attentive to math and science," said Richard D'Amato, senior faculty fellow of engineering.
The competition will benefit the students in helping them practice their science and mathematics skills to further their abilities, D'Amato said.
"We all need to be challenged, and you can call it a competition but I think it is in a way a cooperation, one of the great things about competition is that it brings the best out of ourselves," he said.
Hargrove-Leak said the competition was not only important for the students who would be participating but for Elon as well.
"It's a big deal because the competition is a major national competition," she said. "It's great that we've been able to tap into this national initiative even though our program is quite small."
Engineering students represent about one percent of Elon's student population. Hargrove-Leak hopes that hosting this competition will bring more visibility to Elon's program.
"Engineering is a field that has great potential for success," she said. "In our current job market, engineering professions are still doing quite well, there is still a very high demand for students who study engineering."
Both Hargrove-Leak and D'Amato said they see the competition as a contribution to National Engineers Week, where engineers across America work to promote engineering in schools.
"We, as engineers, consider it part of our duty to give back and inspire young people to pursue our profession so that they can come along and fill our shoes," Hargrove-Leak said.