2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this paper, a case study is presented where a high school student is engaged in independent research in an engineering laboratory at a comprehensive public university. The minority female high school student is the sole participant in this project and is advised by a senior faculty member in the college of engineering. The student’s long-term career goal is to become an aerospace engineer and work for a major national organization. The student undertook this study during the summer between her junior and senior years of high school and continued into the following fall semester while attending school full-time. She initially reached out to the faculty member and inquired about the possibility of doing research at the professor’s laboratory. Her motivation was to design an engineering product that would provide an alternative solution to the existing lunar rover design concepts. She also wanted to learn the research process so she could prepare herself for more advanced opportunities in the future. The student helped develop a research topic, performed literature review, gathered pertinent information, defined requirements, bench marked existing designs, selected off-the-shelf components, planned missions, created models, performed engineering analyses, wrote a paper, and presented her work at a local symposium. In a short amount of time, she learned new material including the use of engineering software and performed valuable analyses. She worked on developing a conceptual design of a lunar rover. The objective of the rover is to collect rock samples from remote locations and bring them back to the base station. The rover is equipped with various sensors to collect data on temperature, radiation levels, soil composition, and moisture. She worked on various aspects of the design starting with requirements definition, creating mission profile, creating Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, and performing Finite Element Analyses (FEA).
The challenges and opportunities of involving high-school minority students are explored in this paper. Research in Engineering Education has demonstrated the value of intellectual development of students when they work with faculty advisors on engaging research projects. Developmental experiences of the student in terms of motivation, learning behaviors, and engineering knowledge are explored. These developments are expected to have a critical impact on higher education and the future career trajectory that the student pursues. This study provides an example of how an independent study may provide opportunities for high school student development and the critical role a university professor and advisor may play in enabling this development.