Introduction
The AEROFAIR USM 2014 outreach program, organized by the School of Aerospace Engineering (SAE) at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), is funded by the Penang Education Council of the Penang Institute under their Program Penggalakan Sains dan Teknologi (PPST) agenda. Under this agenda, a number of other programs including AEROFAIR 2014 are organized to promote and enhance students’ interests towards the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The AEROFAIR program at SAE USM has been conducted almost yearly since 2006 with large participations from secondary school students and teachers in Pulau Pinang.
National Issue on Science Education
In Malaysia, the lack of students’ interest in the STEM fields is becoming a major national issue. The nation has targeted a 60% to 40% ratio of students intake into the science fields compared to the arts fields. However, currently only about 20% of students are entering into the science fields in their Form 4 secondary education (for example, as reported here in November 2012 and in the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025). One reason for this problem is due to the lack of exciting activities for students to enjoy learning and “doing” science in their early secondary school years. One study by Oon and Subramaniam in 2011 even show that students perceive science subjects especially physics and math as boring, difficult, abstract, and irrelevant to the real world. Much efforts are needed to overcome this problem in a sustainable way.
Promoting Science through Activities on Aerospace Science
To address the problem above, AEROFAIR 2014 is organized to make students more aware that science and math subjects are interesting by getting them to participate in activities related to aerospace engineering. We have a unique opportunity at SAE to promote the STEM subjects because of the “fun” aspects of aerospace science: most people and students are naturally excited about flying things! Many studies show that students will become more interested in science when they get to do real activities in their learning process so they can actually “see” the science, rather than simply memorizing formulas and theories to score in exams. This is what we aim to do in this AEROFAIR program – to get students to do fun activities. 3 activities with competitions have been planned in this event: Indoor Flight, Airframe Modeling, and Water Rocket Challenge.
Program Objectives
The AEROFAIR 2014 outreach program has 3 main objectives:
- To boost students’ interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education through self-learning, teamwork, and competitions on activities related to aerospace science.
- To assess students’ and teachers’ views on their science education and on our outreach program using surveys and essays.
- To sustain the impact of our outreach program by creating a post-event bulletin to share the outcomes of this outreach to others.
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