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The primary goal of engineering outreach is to attract prospective students to engineering education and the engineering profession. Gifted students, especially those identified as possessing unusually high abilities in science and technology, are especially promising students to attract to careers in engineering. It is critical to cultivate these students' interests and develop their potential for engineering while encouraging them to pursue engineering studies beyond K-12 education. This article presents examples of the successful learning outcomes of an ongoing University-based Electronics Technology Project Study (UETPS) program, a joint endeavor between the IEEE Hong Kong Section, the Education Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR Government, and the Hong Kong Academy of Gifted Education (HKAGE). The UETPS program promotes electrical, electronic, and computer engineering education in Hong Kong and is aimed particularly at gifted students as well as their parents, teachers, and schools. Project applicants underwent formal identification procedures by the Gifted Education Section of the HKSAR Education Bureau and were identified as being gifted in the area of science and technology. Selected participants then participated in one-year research projects in electronics and computer engineering under the guidance of university professors in their respective engineering departments. This program addresses an urgent need of the engineering education sector by reaching out to highly talented K-12 students and their surrounding communities. According to the evaluation results, the UETPS program has significantly enhanced the participating students' interest in engineering as a career choice and encouraged them to pursue undergraduate studies in engineering. This article also discusses lessons learned and proposes strategies for future potential implementers. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)

We report the first results of a research program which has followed more than 400 infant/parent cohorts who were enrolled in, and attended, continuous weekly/monthly developmental training programs conducted in Asia. Independent measures included regular use of a norm-standardised developmental assessment tool (ASQ, 2006), designed to reveal the developmental milestone attainment times for babies aged 6-33 months of age, inclusively. Results showed elevated scorings for all behaviours measured, across each of five core developmental domains, in comparison to the published norms for age-matched babies born in the USA (p<0.01). More surprisingly, far higher numbers of 'Advanced' performing infants (p<0.001), and far fewer scoring consistent with 'Delayed' performance levels (p<0.001), were recorded after 10 months of developmental achievement training program interaction in four Asian cities. Encouraging caution in supporting our current reliance upon the published normative samples of North American baby developmental achievements for individual child comparisons (as provided by the test publishers), our results suggest there to be a quite different profile of normative developmental abilities observable in China. Our results indicate both higher and faster growing ability rate measures to be now detectable across the standard range of infant developmental performance domain indicators, and thus the need for Asia-Pacific region-specific norm-tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary goal of engineering outreach is to attract prospective students to engineering education and the engineering profession. Gifted students, especially those identified as possessing unusually high abilities in science and technology, are especially promising students to attract to careers in engineering. It is critical to cultivate these students' interests and develop their potential for engineering while encouraging them to pursue engineering studies beyond K-12 education. This article presents examples of the successful learning outcomes of an ongoing University-based Electronics Technology Project Study (UETPS) program, a joint endeavor between the IEEE Hong Kong Section, the Education Bureau of the Hong Kong SAR Government, and the Hong Kong Academy of Gifted Education (HKAGE). The UETPS program promotes electrical, electronic, and computer engineering education in Hong Kong and is aimed particularly at gifted students as well as their parents, teachers, and schools. Project applicants underwent formal identification procedures by the Gifted Education Section of the HKSAR Education Bureau and were identified as being gifted in the area of science and technology. Selected participants then participated in one-year research projects in electronics and computer engineering under the guidance of university professors in their respective engineering departments. This program addresses an urgent need of the engineering education sector by reaching out to highly talented K-12 students and their surrounding communities. According to the evaluation results, the UETPS program has significantly enhanced the participating students' interest in engineering as a career choice and encouraged them to pursue undergraduate studies in engineering. This article also discusses lessons learned and proposes strategies for future potential implementers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reach for something we see, the brain must integrate the target location with the limb to be used for reaching. Neuronal activity in the parietal reach region (PRR) located in the posterior parietal cortex represents targets for reaching. Does this representation depend on the limb to be used? We found a continuum of limb-dependent and limb-independent responses: some neurons represented targets for movements of either limb, whereas others represented only contralateral-limb targets. Only a few cells represented ipsilateral-limb targets. Furthermore, these representations were not dependent on preferred direction. Additional experiments provide evidence that the PRR is specifically involved in contralateral-limb movements: firing rates are correlated with contralateral- but not ipsilateral-limb reaction times. The current study therefore provides novel evidence that the PRR operates as a limb-dependent stage that lies further along the sensory-motor transformation for visually guided reaching than previously expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To acquire something that we see, visual spatial information must ultimately result in the activation of the appropriate set of muscles. This sensory to motor transformation requires an interaction between information coding target location and information coding which effector will be moved. Activity in the monkey parietal reach region (PRR) reflects both spatial information and the effector (arm or eye) that will be used in an upcoming reach or saccade task. To further elucidate the functional role of PRR in visually guided movement tasks and to obtain evidence that PRR signals are used to drive arm movements, we tested the hypothesis that increased neuronal activity during a preparatory delay period would lead to faster reach reaction times but would not be correlated with saccade reaction times. This proved to be the case only when the type of movement and not the spatial goal of that movement was known in advance. The correlation was strongest in cells that showed significantly more activity on arm reach compared with saccade trials. No significant correlations were found during delay periods in which spatial information was provided in advance. These data support the idea that PRR constitutes a bottleneck in the processing of spatial information for an upcoming arm reach. The lack of a correlation with saccadic reaction time also supports the idea that PRR processing is effector specific, that is, it is involved in specifying targets for arm movements but not targets for eye movements [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]