My first days in the middle school gave me a chance to introduce myself to the students and to get to know them a bit better. Over the course of three days, I visited 8 seventh-grade classes (4 of Mrs. Buckwalter's and 4 of Mrs. Karalash's) and used up between 25 and 40 minutes to discuss myself and the general concepts of engineering. I started out by telling the students a little bit about where I'm from and discussed what I'm doing in their classroom, and then I went into trying to define engineering. After I discussed what engineers do and what kinds of jobs engineers have, we played a little game called "Stump the Engineer." This involved me challenging the students to come up with a product that did not involve an engineer. Some of them came up with good examples (fruits, vegetables, and pets were the best in my opinion), but I was always able to come up with a way that engineers helped us get those products (harvesting, transportation, storage, etc.). I think this was good in showing the students that engineers touch our daily lives in ways that we don't typically think about. We concluded by talking a bit about my research on vehicle safety, and in some classes I was able to talk about the MShoe, which was a project I did to design a shoe that would generate electricity to charge an iPod.
For the most part I thought the talks went well, but I didn't quite anticipate the number of questions that middle school students would ask, and I ended up taking up more time than I had hoped. Both teachers were very supportive of me and were surprisingly okay with me taking up most of the class periods. Similarly to high school, typically 10-20% of the class is active in asking and answering questions, and the other portion of the class only speaks up when I happen upon a special interest of theirs. So, my goal for when we start doing labs should be to take special care to engage those students who don't speak up as much. As I experienced in the high school over the last two and a half years, each class sort of has its own personality, and some are very quiet (making it difficult to ask questions and have interesting conversations) while others are very energetic (making it difficult to settle the students down when an exciting topic comes up).
The biggest difference from high school that I noticed was in the maturity level of the students. When I told the students that it was okay to ask questions throughout the talk, I ended up getting a lot of comments and questions that were totally off topic. I liked the enthusiasm and the way the students were willing to be open with me, but I'd like to see that energy in a more directed manner.
