Using mass media to bring engineering principles to young audiences to inspire interest and pursuit of future engineering or technologically based careers

Abstract

In the progression of this thesis document, an idea for an episode of an educational and interactive television show has been explored and developed. The direction of this episode will fit into the aforementioned educational television show format (which will be further described and discussed in subsequent sections of this document). For our particular episode, the focus audience and main target demographic of the theme are young, middle-school aged girls. The theme of the show, which has to do with cooking a familiar and typically well-liked (by children) food by using an alternative energy source and engineering design principles. In this show, it is our goal that both the players and the viewing audience learn about the engineering concepts involved with basic optics and solar energy. In our investigation, a theme for the episode has been developed, and a sample solution has been worked out and tested. Based on the results of this trial run, suggestions and conclusions have been made regarding the future directions for this project.