Reinventing the Engineering: An Extracurricular Program Designed to Attract New Engineering Students

This project was developed aiming at increasing the number of student candidates for undergraduate courses in the field of Engineering. In Brazil and particularly in the Amazon region, official numbers point to a big deficit on the necessary quantity of new engineers in order to fulfill the actual demand of new job positions in the industry. This should be achieved with the use of new teaching methodologies on the basic sciences for high school students coming from public schools in Manaus, Amazon's capital. High school students are invited to attend to workshops and practical laboratory classes, in two University campuses in Manaus, on the subjects of Mathematics, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The workshops shall develop their creativity and give them motivation to learn more complex topics related to those subjects. The lab practical classes are planned to show the students the interface between different subjects and its practical application in the engineering world. This should show the students the relevance and applicability of what they learn in the school as the basis for real problems solutions. Moreover, the chosen topics of each science are related to specific engineering topics.