Overall, the goal of our pre-college program will be to improve attitudes towards STEM through formal and informal engagement with cycles of scientific inquiry and engineering design processes. 

We plan to have long-term engagement with students through multiple programs and allow for intergeneration learning by engaging POETS undergraduates, graduates and faculty with our pre-college activities. 

The focus of the pre-college educational activities is to:

• Design (using engineering clubs and the RET teachers),
• Implement (at partner pre-college institutions), and
• Disseminate (using publications, conferences, and other media)

We have a variety of programs to achieve our pre-college education goals: 

• Summer Young Scholars Program. High School summer research program at Illinois and Arkansas University

• Engineering Clubs & Competition. Engineering design and research project opportunities for high school students during the school year.

• RET. Middle school teachers are placed at a POETS university to learn about POETS research and development curriculum around next generation science standards.