Jean Boudreau
P.Eng. President, Engineers Canada
Each year, National Engineering Month invites children and youth to explore the world of engineering through hands-on activities and events. This year, with pandemic restrictions in place, those engineering activities and events have gone virtual!
With its theme, There’s a Place for You, National Engineering Month celebrates the diversity of thought, opportunities, and people that make up the engineering profession. Throughout March, the engineering profession aims to spark an interest in the next generation of engineers by showing them that with the wide range of engineering disciplines, there is one where their skills, interests, and passions will fit in.
Traditionally, the month sees hundreds of in-person events take place across Canada—from spaghetti bridge-building events to coding workshops. But with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in place this year, Engineers Canada, in collaboration with the provincial and territorial engineering regulators, has developed online engineering activities and events for people of all ages that can be done in class, at home, or online.
For example, a digital scavenger hunt will take kids aged 5 to 11 on an engineering and geoscience journey across Canada. Youth aged 11 to 13 can choose from a dozen engineering design challenges to get a taste for engineering. They’ll use materials easily found at home to build projects that have real-world significance or context. And high school students can explore the different engineering disciplines with online, discipline-specific quizzes that feature trivia-based and problem-based engineering questions that may help them discover which type of engineering interests them the most.
And though in-person events may not be on the agenda this year, there are still dozens of virtual events happening throughout March for children and youth across Canada to explore the world of engineering, as well as events and webinars for post-secondary engineering students.
