2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Summer Engineering Program for Early High School Students

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Technical Session 7: Summer Engineering Learning Programs

Our university started a new pre-college program called Momentum for rising 9th and 10th grade students in Summer of 2025. This one-week, commuter/day program was designed to give early high school students a chance to explore different disciplines in science, engineering, and design through a central academic course. Various courses were offered to expose students to different professional fields, including arts, science, architecture, and engineering. Art and Science of Creating: Engineering + Designing Tomorrow’s Products was one of the courses and ten students enrolled. The students were introduced to a college environment and explored a field of study.

The academic portion for the selected field took place during the day, Tuesday through Friday, 5 hours a day. The main goal was to expose students to different majors through active learning. The course was developed by faculty from Computer, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering, as well as Computer Science, and Industrial Design. Each faculty shared with students their own experience in the field and led a hands-on activity tied to the program. This paper will describe and discuss the hands on activities for Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

The objective of this study was to describe and measure the impact of the engineering activities within the Engineering + Designing Tomorrow’s Products course on the students’ affective and learning experience. A survey was conducted among the students who participated in the course, after completion of the activities. The students expressed that they found the academic experience enjoyable and useful in helping them to identify their future college interests and majors.

Authors

Dr. Jiahui Song Wentworth Institute of Technology [biography]

Jiahui Song received her B.S. in Automation and M.S. in Pattern Recognition & Intelligent Systems from Southeast University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Old Dominion University. She is currently an Associate Professo
Dr. Douglas Eric Dow http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-7265 Wentworth Institute of Technology [biography]

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (started 2008) at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston MA. Program Director of Mechanical and Electromechanical Engineering. Education: Ph.D. and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI); M.S. in Computer Science from University of Colorado (Colorado Springs, CO); B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M (College Station, TX); B.A. in Liberal Arts Engineering from Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL).
Dr. Afsaneh Ghanavati http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-5262-6334 Wentworth Institute of Technology [biography]

Afsaneh Ghanavati received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Shiraz University, Iran, in 1998, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 2012 and 2018, respectively. She is currently an Associate Professor and serves as the Director of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Programs (ECE) in the School of Engineering at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA. She is the recipient of the Douglas D. Schumann Professorship, one of the highest honors bestowed upon Wentworth faculty. Dr. Ghanavati has conducted collaborative research projects with Eversource in Massachusetts and has made significant contributions to ABET-related requirements, focusing on continuous program improvement and accreditation.

Dr. Ghanavati’s research interests include power systems, signal processing, dynamic phasors, dynamic power decomposition, power quality, microgrids, and the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering education. She is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Engineering Honor Society, the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES).
Andreas Armenis Wentworth Institute of Technology

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