Teens & Teachers

Teacher´s Desk

Every brilliant student who comes to Stanford has been guided and shaped by K-12 teachers who worked hard every day to help them reach their potential. We can't put an apple on your desk to say thank you, but the links below point to programs, research, and resources to help teachers as they bring engineering to a younger audience.

Opportunities

  • Camp E-DAY | View »

    Every summer the School of Engineering holds Camp E-DAY (short for engineering day) where our faculty present their latest research to hundreds of kids age 10 and up. The audience is primarily composed of alumni and their families, but K-12 teachers are invited to attend at no charge (the event includes lunch). Last year's theme was "Robots, Racers and Rockets." You can see videos from the event via the link above. We're still working on this year's event, which will be held in mid-July.

  • Exploring New Worlds | View »

    The Stanford chapter of the Society for Women Engineers holds a marvelous event every spring called Exploring New Worlds, in which they organize demos, lessons and other fun science and engineering activities for hundreds of elementary school children.

  • Office of Science Outreach Programs | View »

    Stanford's Office of Science Outreach provides teachers with terrific opportunities to gain first-hand experience with cutting edge research that they can then share with their students. Click above to see all the programs or go directly to pages corresponding to high school, middle school, or elementary school content.

  • Stanford Engineering Everywhere | View »

    Ten full courses, including video lectures, notes, handouts, exams and homework, are available completely free of charge through SEE. Topics include introduction to computer science, artificial intelligence and optimization. Teachers are encouraged to use any or all of the materials so long as they credit Stanford as the source as per the Creative Commons licences.
  • Classroom research

    Our faculty members are dedicated to their research and to nurturing their students, from undergraduate to doctoral studies, but they often get involved in helping teach the next generation of students. Below are published works involving K-12 education co-authored by engineering professors. Citations are included because institutional subscriptions may be necessary to view papers directly online.

    • Beth Pruitt ("Integration of K-12 Outreach with Design Projects in an Introductory Mechanical Engineering Course," 35th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 19 – 22, 2005, Indianapolis)  | View (PDF) »
    • Eric Roberts ("Sparking self-sustained learning: report on a design experiment to build technological fluency and bridge divides," International Journal of Technology and Design Education, Volume 17, Number 1 / January, 2007) | View »
    • Sherri Sheppard ("Students entering and exiting the engineering pipeline-identifying key decision points and trends," Frontiers in Education, 2002, 6-9 Nov.) | View »
    • Bob Twiggs | View »

Other resources

  • Engineering Pathway | View »

    The Engineering Pathway is a National Science Foundation portal to high-quality teaching and learning resources in engineering, applied science and math, computer science/information technology, and engineering technology and is designed for use by K-12 and university educators and students.

Teens and Teachers pages feedback

Watch this video about a professor/teacher collaboration.

Stimulating learning through simulating materials
Stimulating learning through simulating materials

When teachers work with professors for a summer, everybody wins.

terman awards

Every year the School of Engineering honors not only the top 5 percent of its undergraduate class, but also the K-12 teachers those students nominate as the educators who were most influential in helping them achieve that success. More »