In order to engage interest in stem-based activities and careers, CommUniverCity hosts several projects having to do with different fields of engineering and science. 

One of these projects is Aerospace Engineering. Our team reaches out to elementary and middle schools in the downtown San Jose area and works with science teachers to bring fun and creative science fair-styled activities for the kids to participate in or work on. 

The Aerospace Engineering project works by incorporating San Jose State University students through an engineering course that is required for their major. As a part of their grade, they create a lesson about Aerospace Engineering that is fun and easy to present to elementary and middle school-aged children. The SJSU students also include a hands-on learning activity for these kids to interact with. 

This last fall semester, we worked with Ohlone Middle School to host our events. This included 38 Community Engaged Learners from the San Jose State University Engineering course and 210 students from Ohlone Middle School. 

The Service Learners were excited to interact with the middle school students and get them thinking about engineering as a possible career choice in the future. They created lessons to teach the kids about building bridges and how planes and parachutes work. 

At least 48% of the SJSU students also believed that this event helped with their public speaking skills and confidence when working with children. For a lot of them, this was their first time working as service learners in their community. 

Additionally, 68% of the SJSU students felt that they had a greater understanding of the SJSU downtown communities after this experience provided to them by CommUniverCity. Almost all of the service learners said that they enjoyed preparing and presenting at the event. 

Out of the 210 students from Ohlone middle school, over 70% of them believed that they were more interested in Science and Engineering because of the interactive lessons presented to them. 80% of the students would like to be brought more lessons like these. 

CommUniverCity brings Aerospace Engineering as a project to elementary and middle schools in the Fall semesters as that is when the complementary class is offered to SJSU students. Through this project, our staff, service learners, and school children have been given the opportunity to engage, learn, and build. We thank our fellow CommUniverCitans for their continued support.