Reality television has exploded in popularity over the past few years, introducing everything from survival on a deserted island to ballroom dancing to the private lives of celebrities to our collective consciousness. But can reality TV boost the popularity of engineering? Better still, can it teach engineering principles to a young audience of that notoriously hard-to-reach demographic known as “tweens” (children between the ages of 9 and 12)?

Some believe reality TV can, and to prove the point, the IEEE is providing some of the funds for “Design Squad,” a new half-hour weekly television program. Produced by WGBH Boston in partnership with the sponsors of U.S. National Engineers Week (EWeek), “Design Squad” will use the formula of reality television to introduce children and families to engineering design processes.

The show will feature two competing teams of high school students plucked from real life and follow their progress as they design, build, and test fun yet practical machines, such as an automatic pancake maker and a motorized wagon. The eight contestants, chosen through audition, have minimal engineering experience, though for many working with technology is an after-school hobby.

Two hosts—one male and the other female, in their twenties—will act as design advisors for both the audience and the contestants.

The two four-student teams will rotate their members each week of the 13-week season as they compete, building one machine per episode. The scores for each episode will be divided among the participants, and the two with the highest scores at the season’s end will compete for the grand prize: a US $10 000 college scholarship provided by the Intel Foundation.

The show premiers on Public Broadcasting Service stations across the United States during EWeek, the annual engineering week event that takes place this year from 18 to 24 February. A second season is in the early planning stage.

Other funding for the show is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Intel Foundation, Intel Corp., Tyco Electronics, the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, the Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation, the Noyce Foundation, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

COMFORT ZONE “Our goal is to break down stereotypes about engineering and to demystify science and math for children,” says WGBH special initiatives manager Thea Sahr, who helped develop the show. “Kids have a tendency to drop out of science at a pretty young age. But with “Design Squad,” we’re trying to get kids comfortable with math and science before they decide it’s all too difficult.”

Sahr believes “Design Squad” will attract the ever-elusive tween audience because it answers the “So what?” question. It will do this, she says, by showing its young audience how math and science concepts are applied to real-world applications such as the projects the teams undertake.

Each episode will center on a design problem that must be solved. Team members discuss the problem, and the students are filmed as they design, build, and test their machines.

The two hosts offer on-air guidance to the budding engineers. “Our job isn’t to solve the problems for them—but to lead them to ask the right questions,” says Nathan Ball. “We offer help through project updates and short meetings with the kids.”

Ball is a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and chief technical officer of Atlas Devices—a company he cofounded to develop the Powered Rope Ascender, a tool he created that allows reverse repelling up vertical surfaces.

The other host, Deanne Bell, also with a degree in mechanical engineering, designs aerospace equipment for Raytheon Corp., in Los Angeles. She has worked on the company’s forward-looking infrared program and its high-energy laser effort.

Strong backgrounds in mechanical engineering are hardly the hosts’ only strengths, however. In keeping with the show’s theme of “breaking stereotypes,” Bell is a world traveler, while Ball plays jazz piano and holds the men’s varsity pole-vaulting record at MIT.

“The show is about showing that engineers can also be well-rounded people,” says Ball. In one episode, the students build their own musical instruments, and a local band leads students and hosts in a jam session.

The show also uses animation and humor to guide the audience through some of the engineering theories used in the designs. Real engineers are also brought on camera to showcase engineering careers, and the home audience can also find streaming video and behind-the-scenes information through the show’s Web site and blogs.

But the show is more than just fun and games, says Ball, recalling his favorite design challenge of the first 13 weeks: building a durable, low-cost machine that makes peanut butter for a women’s commune in Haiti.

“As the students worked, they began realizing that they were changing these people’s lives,” Ball says. “They saw that through engineering, they were able to make a difference, which is an important theme of the show.”

For more information on “Design Squad,” visit http://pbskids.org/designsquad. To learn about EWeek, visit www.eweek.org.