Aligning outreach with cognitive development: K-12 initiatives in electrical engineering at the University of Washington

This paper describes K-12 initiatives in electrical engineering at UW in the context of how they are linked to learning skill, motivation levels, and common misconceptions demonstrated by K-12 students at various stages of their development. In depth discussion and detail regarding a particular learning activity (From Vision to Cameras) is described to provide an in-depth look into how we approach, design, and improve our K-12 activities and outreach efforts. It is fairly common for outreach programs, when driven by faculty within engineering, to focus on high school outreach, since the outreach can be targeted specifically to recruiting students to certain areas of engineering and benefits of the outreach can be assessed efficiently over a relatively short time scale. The K-12 initiatives described in this paper however focus on the development of learning skills and outreach activities that are specifically linked to current knowledge regarding learning and growth stages in early elementary (K-3), late elementary (4-5), middle school (6-9) and high school (10-12) grade levels.