MEP and MESA are involved with outreach activities with the following schools and community colleges on a regular basis.

Cal Poly MESA Schools Program:

Kermit McKenzie Junior High School, Flamson Middle School, Paso Robles High School, Arellanes Junior High School, El Camino Junior High School, Fesler Junior High School, Kunst Tommie Junior High School, Pioneer Valley High School, Santa Maria High School, Shandon High School.

MESA Community College Program:

Allan Hancock College, Bakersfield College, Cabrillo College, Cañada College, Gavilan College, Hartnell College, Napa Valley College, Mission College, Santa Barbara City College, Santa Rosa Junior College, Skyline College and Ventura College.

Description of Outreach Activities

Fall Quarter 2007

November 6, 2007

Six SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers) members helped with "College Making it Happen" held at Paso Robles High School. Fifty parents attended the presentations that were held in both English and Spanish. The information presented consisted of SAT, PSAT, Admissions, Financial Aid, AP courses and A-G course requirements.

November 1, 2007

Society of Women Engineers held their annual High School Shadow Program that helps expose local high school students to the fields of engineering. The event wouldn't be successful without the following professors:

Helen Yu (EE)
David Braun (EE)
Chris Buckalew (CSC)
David Janzen (CSC)
Stuart Styles (BRAE)
Ed Saliklis (ARCE)
Hugo Conti (CE/ENVE)
Kim Shollenberger (ME)
Kristen O'Halloran Cardinal (BMED)
Tali Freed (IME)
Dean Arakaki (EE)

Brian Green and Carol Schafer from Housing helped provide safe accommodations for the students. The high schools students had the opportunity to live in the dorms with current Cal Poly students. During the High School Shadow they got to visit an Engineering Fair. At the Engineering Fair, the following clubs had demonstrations, poster boards and students available to explain the wide variety of disciplines within the field of engineering: DBF (Design/Build/Fly), SCE (Society of Civil Engineers), EWB (Engineers Without Borders), SENVE (Society of Environmental Engineers), The Robotics Club, SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers), SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers), IEEE, Engineering Advising Center and Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering.

November 1, 2007 and October 25, 2007

Maria Manzano (MESA), David Cantu (MEP) and Jose Millan (SSS) all attended the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE) Graduation at Mary Buren Elementary School, Kermit McKenzie Junior High, and Pioneer Valley High School. A total of 125 parents received a certificate for completing the PIQE nine-week program. After completing the program parents should have the knowledge and ability to:

• Successfully support children through US public school system to prepare for college requirements.
• Negotiate with school teachers, counselors and principals in order to access resources that support and enhance child's academic progress.
• Build their children's foundation for positive citizenship, problem solving, self discipline and cultural and moral values that lead to success in school and life.
• Know how the US school system functions, the academic expectation of the US school system for student grading, promotion, public schools expectations for parent engagement and support and college-going requirements.
• Establish and maintain a supportive home learning environment (homework, daily routines, television viewing).
• Recognize importance of promoting reading (time to read at home, use of library, reading for pleasure and information).
• Establish and maintain communication with their child's teacher, counselor, principal (initiating parent-teacher conferences, in order to enlist their assistance to promote their child's academic success and social-emotional development).

October 31, 2007

Cuesta held the Cuesta College Tech Fair. Several hundred high school students were bused in to learn about technical careers. Representatives from Cal Poly included: Maria Manzano (MESA), Tony Cruz (IME), and Chris Dirkes (IME).

October 2007

Society of Women Engineers hosted the Build an Engineer event. 140 middle school students and 40 parents participated in the day. Representatives from many of the engineering departments volunteered and helped the students with the following activities:

John Clements, Diana Franklin, and David Janzen from the Computer Science department worked with students in the Computer Science lab on a sequence of three exercises, each designed to highlight a different aspect of computer science. The first exercise allowed the students to design virtual fabrics as part of an exercise on function composition, a Lego exercise helped students understand how machine instructions are decoded, and the www.alice.org environment allowed students to experiment with 3-dimensional motion.

Kathy Chen from the Materials Engineering Department helped create MATEland that had different attractions with interactive demonstrations of new materials. The participants received a passport so they could get a stamp for every attraction they visited. The participants also got to make liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Jessica Keifer and John Hupton from the Electrical Engineering Department helped the participants build an electric buzzer on solderless breadboards, and then added LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). Students were then allowed to take the circuits home.

Dan Waldorf from the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department worked with the students practice some drawing using a solid modeling package (ProEngineer) in our CAD design lab. They used splines to create a free-form curve, then mirrored about the center plane to create a nice-looking closed curve. Then the curve was extruded to create their own solid model. After the practice, one student was selected to re-design the nose for a dog design for a kitchen magnet. The student used their new skills (spline curves and mirroring) to design the custom nose.

All the students then got to walk through IME's advanced manufacturing lab and loaded a piece of aluminum into the milling machine. The aluminum had the dog magnet mold already cut out - except for the nose. With the new machine instructions, they push started the machine and cut out the custom nose feature. With the updated mold the students then walked to the IME's Net Shape lab and inserted the aluminum mold in our injection molder. Then poured plastic pellets in the machine and operated enough cycles to mold plastic dogs for each attendee - all with the custom-designed nose. Most participants got a chance to close the mold and operate the injection mechanism for the machine. The magnet was then made by adding a drop of glue and a small magnet to the back of each part.

Lily Laiho and the Biomedical and General Engineering Department did a brief introduction of what Biomedical Engineering is and different areas that Biomedical Engineering is applied to. After the introduction the students got to do a hands-on lab where they casted a wax model of their own fingers. They also got to see some rapid prototyping technologies that Cal Poly students use in their courses.

Sept/Oct 2007

The Multicultural Engineering Program will host students from Santa Rosa Junior College, Gavilan College, Mission College, Hartnell College and Skyline College for a day. The day's events include: an engineering overview, a tour of Cal Poly campus and a panel of ten current Cal Poly engineering students. Current students will share their experiences and goals at Cal Poly. As well as information on internships, financial aid, housing and studying habits. The day ends with an Admissions Information Session.