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Activities Roundup National Engineers Week is turning 50! Founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, National Engineers Week is celebrated annually by thousands of engineers, engineering students, teachers, and leaders in government and business. In 1990, the National Engineers Week consortium expanded its scope and now includes more than 100 engineering, scientific, and education societies, and major corporations dedicated to increasing public awareness and appreciation of technology and the engineering profession. Co-chairs for 2001 are the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and IBM. Introduce a Girl to
Engineering Day. A Sightseer's Guide to
Engineering. This state-by-state guide will include engineering achievements and activities from all disciplines in an entertaining, illustrated display that will show the public that engineering is everywhere. To add suggestions, visit www.eweek.org/nspe/engineeringsights. The Charles Stark Draper Prize and the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize will be awarded at a black-tie dinner and presentation ceremony at Union Station, Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, February 20. The $500,000 Draper Prize is often referred to as the "Nobel Prize" of engineering. The new biennial Russ Prize, also worth $500,000, will be awarded for the first time in 2001 in recognition of outstanding achievement in an engineering field of critical importance that, through widespread use, contributes to improving the human condition. The first Russ Prize will recognize achievement in bioengineering. The National Engineers Week Future City CompetitionTM invites seventh and eighth-grade students, their teachers, and volunteer-engineer mentors to design future cities on computer software, then build three-dimensional scale models of their cities and defend their designs to a panel of engineers and city planners. Winners from 26 regional competitions held across the country in January will compete in the national finals at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill in Washington on February 20 and 21. The competition, now in its ninth year, has grown by more than one-third just since last year and is now expected to reach 30,000 students, making it one of the largest educational programs of its kind. More information can be found at http://www.futurecity.org. The National Engineering Design Challenge (NEDC), a hands-on program in which teams of high school students, with the advice of a teacher-coach and engineer mentor, design, build, and demonstrate a working model of a new product aimed at solving a public need. NEDC conducts its national finals for regional winners during National Engineers Week on February 20 and 21 at the Hyatt Regency. This year's NEDC problem statement is to design and fabricate a product that will help make life easier for people with disabilities, in areas such as computer/user interface, food preparation and eating, personal hygiene, transportation, or clothing. The design needs to appeal to as wide a market as possible, including those without disabilities, so that if it would ever go into production, it would be financially viable. NEDC is coordinated by JETS (Junior Engineering Technical Society) and more information can be found at www.jets.org. http://www.discoverengineering.org, a Web site developed, sponsored, and launched during National Engineers Week 1999 by that year's co-chair, Eastman Chemical Company, educates middle school students with information about what engineers do and how to become one. The site, which has been praised by the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and The Washington Times, among others, offers comprehensive information on the engineering of nine "cool things" —including CD players, roller coasters, high performance sporting goods, and cars—general background on careers in engineering, games, downloadables, and hundreds of links to corporations, engineering societies, and other resources. Breaking Through: The Creative Engineer, the exhibition that opened at the National Building Museum in Washington during National Engineers Week in 1998, finishes its three-year, nine-city nationwide tour and is scheduled to appear in 2001 in Rochester, New York, Alamogordo, New Mexico, and Lubbock, Texas. A Drive-Time Radio Tour, featuring a top executive from IBM and highlighting Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, will be broadcast in dozens of cities across the country during the week. Discover "E," a program that lets 40,000 engineers nationwide work with more than five million elementary, junior and senior high school students to help them discover practical applications of math, science and technology through hands-on activities in the classroom and in extracurricular programs. Engineering Goes Public, a program that helps hundreds of libraries, science/technology centers, engineering project sites, and local malls—in conjunction with the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Junior Engineering Technical Society—host Engineering Day to educate the public during National Engineers Week. National Technological University sponsors the 12th annual "Discover Engineering" telecast during National Engineers Week, a live satellite telecast for junior and senior high school students to learn about engineering careers. You can view a webcast of the program on February 23. More information can be found at http://www.ntu.edu. Visit http://www.eweek.org or call (703) 684-2852 for more information.
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National Engineers Week Foundation
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