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For many high school students in rural Colorado, engineering once felt distant—something that happened somewhere else, by someone else.

But over the past decade, an outreach program in the��Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering has been working to change that reality.

The program, known as the Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC), connects CU Boulder students with rural high schools to introduce hands-on engineering experiences into the classroom, turning local questions about air and soil quality into real-world research projects.

Today, the initiative serves 12 schools and nearly 700 high school students across rural Colorado each year. Its origins, however, were far more modest.

The early evolution

Launched in 2012 with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the program began as a research endeavor. At the time, there was only one graduate student working on the project. They were tasked with using an environmental air quality monitor, positioned at Paonia High School, to investigate the impacts of fracking.

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A close look at an air quality monitor, otherwise known as a Y-pod, developed in the Hannigan lab.

But it wasn’t long before the monitors proved they could do more than just collect data—they could spark learning.

“One day, a teacher at the high school saw the monitor up on the roof and thought it would make for a good tool in the classroom,” said Daniel Knight, an associate research professor in mechanical engineering and SCENIC co-founder. “It’s a small monitor that could easily fit in the hands of students. We saw the potential and decided to develop a high-school curriculum using the monitor as a way to deliver engineering education.”

By summer 2013, the curriculum was ready and the monitoring device had been redesigned for classroom use. The following year, Knight and his small team were ready to scale the program, expanding their outreach to four rural high schools.

However, the group soon realized that sustaining rapid growth meant recruiting more college students to lead the high school classrooms. That’s when they decided to introduce a new course in mechanical engineering called��Project Based Learning (PBL) in Rural Schools.

Developed alongside professor and fellow SCENIC co-founder��Michael Hannigan, the year-long class takes a two-pronged approach. During the first semester, college students learn to master the monitoring technology and become confident classroom leaders. In the second semester, they travel to their assigned rural high schools and help teachers implement the engineering curriculum.

“We piloted the course for the first time in the 2015-2016 school year with just eight students and it really worked,” Knight said. “From there, we were fortunate enough to attract more funding, allowing us to add more students and schools. We even brought CU Boulder’s School of Education onboard to help monitor the program and identify ways we can improve our outreach efforts going forward.”

A broader impact

Now, nearly 30 undergraduate and graduate students enroll in the class each year, guiding rural high schoolers through projects that range from testing indoor air quality to analyzing soil conditions on local farms.

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A group of students at Northfork High School in Hotchkiss, Colorado running a soil burning activity to determine the impact of fire on soil quality.

It’s a unique opportunity for rural high school students to turn their own towns into living laboratories. But Knight says it’s also an opportunity for the university to reach students who might otherwise never see themselves in engineering.

“Engineering and science education is very limited in these rural places,” said Knight. “Our goal is to bring a more interesting, project-based approach to their classrooms. That way we can get the word out about engineering and even just about attending college.”

Knight believes that establishing a more robust engineering identity in rural Colorado could benefit local communities, as well.��

Rady Mechanical Engineering is already building that pipeline through��partnerships with Western Slope universities that help rural students earn engineering degrees. Maybe one day, rural high schoolers inspired by the department’s outreach can return to their hometowns as engineers, bringing new ideas and solutions to their communities.

Or maybe they return to the program, this time as mentors, guiding students at the same rural high school that first sparked their interest in engineering.

“We offer our partnership program students the opportunity to take a remote section of the PBL course, and sometimes students we once mentored in high school come back as college students to take it,” Knight said. “When they are trained and ready to go, we like to send them back to the high schools they came from to mentor the next generation of students. It’s really rewarding to see that full circle moment come to fruition.”

With the program’s NSF award funding set to expire this year, Knight and his team are preparing a new grant proposal to try and keep their outreach alive. But they say maintaining the status quo isn’t enough—they want the program to strengthen and evolve.��

“For years, the program has been mainly centered around air and soil science. However, we are also working to add another avenue of inquiry focused on wildfires,” said Knight. “It’s a topic that is extremely important in our state, especially in rural and mountainous areas of Colorado. We hope that adding wildfire questions into our curriculum gives high school students another meaningful way to engage with engineering and real-world problem solving.”