DREAM PROJECT

    DREAM, short for Designing with Rice Engineers - An Austin High School Mentorship Program, is an innovative outreach program held by SHPE Rice in Partnership with G.R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University and Bank of America. The objective of this program is to get students from Austin High School, a majority Hispanic HS, pumped up about Engineering, Sciences and College Education. The selected students are separated into smaller groups and are asked to solve an engineering problem, for example: how to drop an egg without it breaking or how to make a small device float while carrying as much weight as possible? Each group is assigned 2-3 mentors which are Rice University students from different engineering disciplines. The HS students need to be very creative with their approach to solving these problems since all they are given are day-to-day materials like paper, straws, cotton and alike. After 7 weeks of mentoring, the students come to Rice Campus and compete against each other for the best design. While on campus, they get to go on a tour and learn a little bit more about what is it to be an engineering student and how to get in to college.

Our program has been featured in a news clip by Fox 26 - Building Better Minds. Check it out by clicking here!