The IEEE Teacher In-Service Program expanded beyond the United States, to Malaysia and South Africa in 2006, and this year has its sights set on Argentina, Kenya, and Peru. TISP partners IEEE volunteers with preuniversity educators to offer the teachers lessons on a variety of technical subjects. The lessons cover such things as motors, switches, circuits, and simple machines during “in-service” days that are regularly set aside for teachers for continuing-education activities.

But before the volunteers can begin work, they need a little help themselves on how to inject engineering principles into lesson plans. To this end, TISP offers 15 hands-on lesson plans for various grades, available in English and Spanish. These include how to design and build a bag for holding candy and how to build a robot arm.

Since the program began in 2001, more than 400 IEEE members have been trained at sessions held in the United States. But last August and September, the IEEE took the program on the road. A one-and-a-half-day training workshop held in Putrajaya, Malaysia, attracted 79 educators and IEEE volunteers; another 89 also attended a session in Cape Town. Preuniversity educators from these countries served as panelists and speakers to provide IEEE members with the teachers’ perspective.

AWARENESS OF S&T “I go for anything that improves awareness of science and technology,” says Senior Member Mohammed Nasir Taib, head of the system department and a professor at the Universiti Teknologi Mara, in Malaysia’s province of Shah Alam. “If people learn about engineering early on, they will like all the advantages of being an engineer.”

Ida Mohamad, an educator attending the same workshop, was impressed with what she learned. “I heard of the IEEE about four years ago, but I never knew what kind of activities it could organize and how it could partner with teachers in schools,” she says. She plans to use the candy-bag lesson in her class and also wants “to teach students that engineering can change society.”

Member Saurabh Sinha, a lecturer and an electronics engineer, was at the session in Cape Town. He is one of the founding members of South Africa’s IEEE Education Chapter and works with the University of Pretoria to recruit students to study engineering.

“We found that there is usually a lack of interest in math and science among students…and that engineers working with educators would definitely make a big difference,” he says. “I am trying to get students attached to engineers at a young age—it made a difference for me, and I think it will make a very big difference in South Africa.”

Jennifer Rault-Smith, an educator with the Western Cape Education Department, appreciates how much she can learn from TISP. “When you are standing in front of 30 to 40 teenagers, you must understand what you are teaching,” she says.

The next TISP workshop will be held 13 and 14 July, in Dallas. Dates are still being worked out for the workshops in Argentina, Kenya, and Peru.

For more information about TISP, visit http://www.ieee.org/education/precollege/tispt.