Establishing a K-12 circuit design program

Outreach, as defined by Wikipedia, is an effort by an organization or group to connect its ideas or practices to the efforts of other organizations, groups, specific audiences, or the general public. This paper describes a computer engineering outreach project of the Department of Computer Engineering at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, to a local elementary school. A group of 14 K-12 students was chosen by a four-stage selection method to participate in this project. This group was then taught discrete mathematics and logic design courses from the core curriculum of the Computer Engineering program. The two 11-week courses have a total of 132 contact h. The course contents are conveyed through both theoretical lessons and laboratory sessions. All of the laboratory sessions were carried out by K-12 students. Volunteer teachers from the elementary school participated in the project. The evaluations carried out during and at the end of project indicated the degree of satisfaction on the part of students and teachers. The project is still ongoing with the same methodology in its third year. © 2009 IEEE