A Collaborative Effort to Teach Technology and Engineering Concepts to Middle School and High School Students in the Dominican Republic.
This paper will report on a joint effort with members of our faculty and personnel at Complex Systems Optimization Lab (COSOLA) to provide a summer program in the Dominican Republic to teach technology and engineering topics to middle school and high school students.
COSOLA has sponsored a summer program, MACILE (Mathematics, Sciences, and Languages), for the last few years for Dominican Republic students. In the summer of 2009, our faculty presented material to broaden the subject matter to include technology and engineering concepts. A major goal of the COSOLA initiative is to encourage students to pursue higher education in technology and engineering disciplines.
During the activities, we used material developed by the Engineering is Elementary program at the Boston Museum of Science. The Dominican Republic students and faculty were very engaged and enjoyed the learning experience in spite of challenging language differences.
We will report on the activities conducted as well as discuss the challenges in presenting the material and how the material was received and understood by the participating students.
