In a day filled with tours, games and solar-car races, a group of middle school students learned all about engineering at Iowa State.

About 50 eighth-graders from West and Central Muscatine Middle Schools visited campus Wednesday as part of an outreach program by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Melody Carroll, graduate student in educational leadership and policy studies, planned the schools’ visit to “promote engineering and introduce kids to activities in engineering.”

Vicky Thorland-Oster, academic adviser for electrical and computer engineering, coordinated the outreach program. She said they decided to have the students make solar cars because the middle-schoolers were looking for an affordable, hands-on activity.

The goal of the outreach program is to get more diversity in electrical and computer engineering, she said. “We spent many hours asking `how do we get more women and underrepresented minorities in our department?'” Thorland-Oster said. “We target girls and other minorities, but we are not exclusive.”

The Muscatine eighth-graders “have been identified as talented and gifted,” Thorland-Oster said, and there happens to be more girls than boys in the group. “We will be doing a longitudinal assessment to see if we get more girls from this school district,” she said.

Thorland-Oster said they decided to create partnerships with middle schools, because students start thinking about career choices at that age.

“By the time a student gets to high school they have begun making those choices early,” she said. “We thought reaching them sooner than high school would be a good thing to do.”

Emily Bennett and Matt Truit, eighth-graders at West Muscatine Middle School, made the solar car together and won first place in the final race.

Truit said he had fun when they “went to the wind tunnel and tested the plane.”

Randyl Meyer, eighth grader at West Muscatine Middle School, said she was excited to come to Iowa State again, making it her third visit here in the past month.

“I really want to be an engineer,” she said. “My dad is a chemical engineer, and we always mix chemicals together. I really like technology and building things.”