President's Message

July is always an exciting time for me because I spend a month working with pre-university students. My university offers four residential summer camps for teenagers entering their sophomore, junior, or senior years of high school. The four camps offer students varying degrees of engineering exploration through scaffolded learning experiences in ten different engineering fields. Three of the camps are co-educational weeks and one is specifically focused on women. The curiosity about engineering is evident in these young men and women. Yet, as we know, the educational pipeline into engineering as a profession still lags demand in many parts of the world. I work with the high school students so that I can answer their questions, mentor them on career choice, and show them the excitement I have for my field of engineering. I know many of you do the same at your universities, or perhaps through extra-curricular activities like First Robotics, Smart Cities, Rube Goldberg, Scouting, or similar programs in your country.

While the Education Society is a community mainly focused on university education, another part of the larger IEEE does reach earlier into the educational pipeline. The IEEE Educational Activities Board is an IEEE organizational unit responsible for lifelong continuing education products for engineers from all fields, as well as early K12 outreach and STEM advocacy. One of their signature programs is the TryEngineering suite of products that crosses all levels of pre-university education. Launched in 2006, TryEngineering has grown over thirteen years to include educational lesson plans, educational apps, mentor relationships, and the two-week TryEngineering Summer Institute. There are opportunities for Society members to help ensure the continued success of this important IEEE initiative. I am working closely with the Educational Activities Board to identify volunteer opportunities for Society members. Watch for details from me soon.

It is vitally important that educators participate fully in the education and enrichment of our students’ lives. The work that we do crosses the boundaries of the educational pipeline. As experts in our field, our role should be mentorship of any student interested in engineering regardless of their age. Young people are the future of society and will chart the course of humanity; let’s give them every opportunity to ask their questions and let’s work to provide solid answers and appropriate mentorship.

July is always also an interesting month for the Society because the latest journal citation statistics arrive. As you will read in a newsletter report from our Vice President of Publications, the Society’s journals continue to improve in quality and excel in the rankings. As a reminder, our three flagship journals are the IEEE Transactions on Education, the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technology, and the IEEE Journal of Latin American Learning Technologies (IEEE Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologías del Aprendizaje – IEEE RITA). Each has its own scope and serves unique audiences within our Society and the broader engineering education community.

The Society is a leader within IEEE by offering IEEE RITA – a journal focused specifically on the education of engineers in the Ibero-American community. IEEE RITA papers can be published in multiple languages with the English version available through IEEE Xplore, and versions in Spanish or Portuguese freely available through a Society hosted portal. Like the Transactions, IEEE RITA works to maintain high quality publication and peer review. As our newest journal, it is still awaiting its first indexing in the citation indexes. I encourage all members of our Society – and in particular those members that work within the Ibero-American community – to remember that IEEE RITA needs your publication submissions in order for it to have sufficient volume to achieve indexing and ranking in the citation reports.

I hope you enjoy reading the content of this newsletter. I value every member of our Society and thank you for your contributions. Together, we are a dedicated group of skilled professionals working toward the goal of helping our engineers and computer scientists in-training build bright futures for themselves.

Sincerely,
Russ