2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Each summer the United States Military Academy at West Point hosts approximately 1,110 rising high school seniors in a unique week-long immersive program called the West Point Summer Leader Experience (SLE). SLE students experience life at West Point, which includes exposure to academic majors, team-building athletic activities, and military training. Each participating academic department hosts several three-hour workshops during which groups of 20-25 students learn about an academic discipline in which they could major. Students are allowed to select workshops in academic departments from which they are most interested. The goal of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering is to provide students a better understanding of what it means to major in environmental science or environmental engineering. To support this goal, our faculty developed an exercise that uses a combination of lecture material and laboratory experimentation. During the 50-minute lecture period, faculty describe the attributes of both academic majors and introduce topics like water resources and quality, public health, fish biodiversity, and water treatment methods through interactive exercises. In the laboratory portion, students are divided into groups of 4-5 who then compete in a water treatment filter-building challenge. The students are provided with a water bottle, several different media (e.g., sand), a “challenge water,” and water quality instrumentation such as turbidity, pH, and conductivity meters. Students are expected to design a filter, execute the design, develop a null hypothesis based on how the water quality will change, and run the experiment. At the end of the workshop, students are asked to complete a survey to determine the workshop's effectiveness. Anecdotal results from the 2023 SLE showed that students had little knowledge of the environmental science and environmental engineering professions prior to the three-hour workshop; however, students stated they had a fundamental understanding of each profession upon completing the workshop. Additionally, students found that the water treatment filter building challenge was generally a fun and useful approach to understanding what environmental engineers and scientists do in their professions. Results from this study suggest this type of hands-on workshop could be useful for high school major’s fairs or other higher-learning institutions to help students understand different STEM professions and/or aid students in deciding an academic major.