Woodruff School Hosts Inaugural STEM Mentorship Program GT PRIME
July 22, 2024
Story by Chloe Arrington; Photos by Ashley Ritchie and Zack Winiecki; Video by Mikey Fuller
This summer, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering hosted an inaugural STEM immersion and mentoring program, GT PRIME, developed for school counselors and K-12 students in the community.
Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and professor, wished to start a program that focused on outreach to K-12 school counselors in the Atlanta area to promote the Woodruff School's offerings directly to prospective students. He challenged Jonathan Gaines, Associate Chair for Inclusive Excellence in the Woodruff School, to create a framework which could easily be expanded. The detailed idea for GT PRIME came from Gaines who has previous experience with STEM mentoring programs.
"We wanted to give K-12 students and counselors in our community a behind-the-scenes look at what the Woodruff School has to offer," said Ranjan. "We wanted them to step foot on campus, spend time getting to know our faculty and staff, gain a complete understanding of mechanical engineering and how it's used to address real-world problems, and walk away knowing at Georgia Tech, we can do that!"
The first cohort of GT PRIME participated in a multi-week camp that focused on skill building, collaboration, and mentorship. The program had concurrent goals for the students and mentors: training mentors to connect their students with engineering avenues, and hands-on activity-based programming to introduce students to engineering and the Woodruff School. Ten school counselors were selected from the Fulton County School and Atlanta Public School networks to act as mentors for the program.
"School counselors are perfect as mentors because they are professionally equipped to build relationships and connect with middle school kids," said Gaines. "They have connections at their school to foster engineering interest amongst students once they return to their home institutions." The Woodruff School partnered with Georgia Tech's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), who identified 24 students to participate in the program.
The program ran for four weeks, with the first week dedicated to training the counselors on engineering, culturally responsive mentoring, and the program's values. Students joined the program for weeks two, three, and four.
GT PRIME had four key goals. The first was to increase the engineering identity of all participants using the engineering design process and projects. The second was to inform participants on the offerings of the Woodruff School through regular interactions with faculty and staff and hands-on activities. The third was to build strong relationships between all participants through team-building exercises and by presenting engineering in a collaborative environment. And the final goal was for the school counselors to translate their experiences back to their home school. To aid this, counselors completed a parallel project where they created an initiative to implement in their schools upon their return.
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The days were split into two sessions. The morning sessions allowed the counselors and students to learn about engineering and increase their understanding of the Woodruff School through lab tours and demonstrations.
The afternoon sessions were primarily for robotics design activities, during which participants met in groups and designed a robot to address a real-world challenge with an engineering-based solution. The groups learned how to build the robot base platform, program the base platform, and then adapt the robot for specific tasks that addressed their selected real-world issue.
Christian Ford, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), helped coordinate the camp and led the afternoon sessions. Mack Curtis, academic assistant II in the Woodruff School, hosted multiple tours in the Flowers Invention Studio for the participants, where he introduced them to laser cutting and gave demonstrations on the machines.
"I was a lead for a TRiO program (Talent Search) where I found immense joy in structuring nurturing programs like this. As a TRiO alum, I feel a personal duty to engage and bond with students," said Curtis. "Exposing children from under-resourced environments to opportunities in education has the potential to spark something transformative in them."
Laura Sams Haynes, senior academic professional in ECE, represented the School as the director of outreach and collaborated with Gaines and Sirocus Barnes in CEISMC to launch GT PRIME. ECE also provided financial support for the program’s student facilitators.
"The debut of GT PRIME has highlighted the strength of Georgia Tech's collaborative spirit," said Haynes. "By engaging young students with hands-on engineering lessons and working to integrate STEM principles further into the middle school curriculum, the program will make a meaningful contribution that extends well beyond the summer."
The program culminated with participants giving final presentations to an audience full of parents at the John Lewis Student Center.
Gaines is happy with the impact the program had on everyone involved and is looking forward to continuing GT PRIME in the future. "We plan to develop GT PRIME next summer and offer additional experiences in ECE, and we are also speaking with faculty in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering to be part of the expansion."
