The Student Engineers Network: Strengthening Opportunities in Research (SENSOR) Saturday Academy was an education and outreach program

created for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. An important first step to the long-term implementation of the SENSOR Saturday Academy was to demonstrate its potential effectiveness. In 2007, I received a $50K grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Student Science Enrichment Program for the development and deployment of a pilot program. I completed a SENSOR Saturday Academy pilot program in October 2007 to introduce students to the engineering design process in the context of evaluating water quality. An important emphasis was for the students to become familiar with different types of sensors used for measuring water quality. The long-term vision for the SENSOR Saturday Academy is to complement and extend a number of outreach programs already in existence in the Engineering K-PhD Program through the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University.