• April 30, 2018

    UW Engineering Discovery Days

    Many of our consortium universities offer some sort of platform for reaching out to elementary-, middle-, and high-school age students to expose them to the many opportunities in engineering and to raise interest in STEM education and careers. At the University of Washington, this platform is called Engineering Discovery Days. Each year this 2-day event offers students and faculty from all UW engineering departments the opportunity to share their work with students, teachers, families and the community, while featuring hands-on and interactive activities that demonstrate the exciting work of engineers.

    This year, on April 19 and 20, PacTrans hosted our annual booth during Discovery Days. Hundreds of students participated in our facilitated activity, Rush Hour © which combines problem solving with the overarching theme of mobility in transportation. Also present was the PacTrans sponsored, student Hyperloop team and several of the labs in Transportation Engineering.

    The STAR Lab had demos on traffic signalization and controller boxes, driving simulation, and video detection. The Sustainable Transportation Lab featured a hands on activities introducing students to electrification and charging networks. PacTrans is very proud of the proactive approach we take to recruiting young students to engineering education and specifically to transportation related disciplines.