The Exposure of Electrical Engineering Field as a STEM Branch towards Technical School’s Students in Malaysia

Abstract

The decreasing interest in Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) amongst school students has become an issue that requires stern actions to be enforce. The decreasing interest in STEM will directly impacted the decreasing enrollment of students in Higher Learning Institution (HLI) engineering courses. Related to that, the school of electrical engineering Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Johor branch Pasir Gudang campus is not exempted with the mentioned problem. This decreasing interest in STEM issue may come from the lack of exposure related to the attributes of the STEM field amongst secondary school students. It is crucial to educate and expose these students towards the importance of STEM where they are the potential students for the HLI. Thus, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the action that have been taken by conducting a webinar in order to expose secondary school students the attributes of electrical engineering as one of the important field in the branch of STEM. A webinar will be conducted that will explain the career, the experience of studying abroad, and the happiness that is related with electrical engineering in STEM. In addition a survey form will be distributed and an online quiz will be conducted at the end of the webinar. From the survey, important results were observed where 85% percent of students is interested to pursue their studies in the electrical field after listening to the webinar related to the career after finishing secondary school. In addition, 97.5% students are interested to further their studies in the electrical engineering field after listening to the webinar the experience of studying abroad after finishing secondary school.