An overview of Maine Section pre-university activities in 2017.

• The IEEE STEM Ambassadors program trains K-12 teachers in STEM.
  • This is the fourth year that the IEEE USA, the IEEE Maine Section, has worked with the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance to put on the STEM Ambassadors Program, which is generously supported by Texas Instruments. The program brings together Maine science teachers and technical professionals. In it the teachers visit a technical facility and learn what engineers do, learn an engineering project with a technical professional, and are matched with one. Later the techie goes into the teacher’s classroom to work the project with students and discuss engineering as a career. The goal is that more students will go into technical disciplines. This year Central Maine Power on March 13, 2017 and Baker Company on March 16, 2017 were the companies that participated. At CMP the teachers learned first-hand what it takes to effectively operate an electric utility while at Baker they learned about the design, manufacture, and support of equipment for medical research.
• For the past several years, the Maine Section has had a table at the Oxford Maine Elementary School’s Career Fair where K-6 students and their teachers learn what engineers do.
• The section had a table to recruit ECE majors at the University of Maine’s Student Research Symposium which was highly attended by the general community.
  • As part of the section’s efforts to better participate in the general community and to encourage students to major in electrical and computer engineering the Section was a sponsor of and had a booth at the 2017 University of Maine Student Research Symposium held on April 24th at the Cross Center in Bangor.   Congratulations go to Armando Ayes (undergraduate) and Chitra Manjanai (graduate) who received the IEEE Maine Section Top ECE Student awards at the.2017 University of Maine Student Research Symposium. (see photo above).
• The Section Chair attended a State of Maine conference on defining K-12 computer education.  Important is that aside from the outside counsel for one of the attendees the IEEE Section chair was the only non-academic invited to attend.
  
• The section had a table to promote continuing in ECE at Central Maine Community College’s IT Day festivities.

To support these activities, several materials were developed including an Engineers Job Description and Why ECE.   These materials are available upon request.

(Overview provided by Ronald Brown, Maine Section Chair)