Blog 5b: Science Fair Proposal

1. What is your topic?

STEM.

2. What is the driving problem behind your experiment and the quote by an expert to support that problem? (Expert citation must be MLA format.)

"In elementary classrooms today, 38 percent of teachers lack full confidence in their qualifications to teach science. Almost as many say they rely more on what they learned in high school science than on what they learned in their teacher preparation courses in college."

- "What Is STEM?" The National Center for STEM Elementary Education. St. Catherine University, n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2013.

Therefore, by providing students with information and education related to STEM, they will be more likely to pursue a career in STEM professions. 

3. What is your hypothesis? (Must be in If-Then form.)

If a student receives information in STEM careers, then they will voice an interest in STEM careers.

4. Write a paragraph summary of how you will perform the experiment.  Include the tools you plan on using.

I will create an attitude test. I will give a classroom of students the survey to begin, and collect the results. Then, I will give the class a presentation on STEM, and do several activities with them related to STEM. Then, after a week or so after the activities, I will give the students the same attitude test as before. 
My mentor has a test making program and system that I could use to create the test. 

5. Select one of the following Project Categories for your experiment:Behavioral/Social Science

Blog 5a: Science Fair Problem Statement

Engineering

1. Cities are losing funding, meaning less jobs at the city level, which will result in a massive transition to jobs with private contract companies. 

Hopefully with private companies understanding this natural cycle, they would be more open to make job openings more readily available in the future, allowing for a consistently stable field for future engineers.

2. Traffic signal communication equipment is becoming more and more unreliable, resulting in more management and repairs of field equipment. 

The solution to this problem, would most likely be held in finding new traffic timing field equipment, which would prove to be much more reliable and steady in communicating real-time traffic issues. I would then attempt to petition for the replacement of old, unreliable pieces of equipment in the field with the new  equipment found.

3. There are not enough students going into the engineering field. (Thanks Melogno!)

I will attempt to connect more high school school students to young internship programs to raise awareness for the field and to hopefully get more teens interested in Engineering.

4. Many students don't know what engineers actually do, or what is entailed on the job.

Perhaps upon providing more information to students, more and more will become interested in engineering, fully knowing what the field holds and the fun that could be had on the job.