Bringing signal processing to high school students - A novel gravity measurement experiment

The supply of the engineers who keep our modern society ticking is dependent on the attitudes of high school students towards tertiary engineering education. This supply has been reducing in recent years, which has led to worldwide efforts to address this problem. Traditionally, these efforts either focus on students themselves, attempting to educate them on engineering careers and concepts, or on their teachers in order to equip them with better skills to enhance their students´ prospects of pursuing an engineering career. This paper describes a new gravity measurement experiment that illustrates a number of signal processing and engineering concepts to high school kids. The experiment makes these concepts entirely accessible to students by choosing a context that is familiar to them. The demonstration has been running for the last three years and has been found to be successful in reaching out to students.