Duke Engineering Hosts Riverside High School Engineering Program

After a long career at Durham’s Riverside High School, Adam Davidson took on a new opportunity in 2022 as a senior laboratory administrator at Duke. But he kept the relationships he built over 15 years at Riverside.

Davidson helped launch Riverside’s engineering program, part of the national initiative Project Lead the Way, which aims to educate future generations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—commonly known as STEM.

Since joining Duke Engineering, Davidson has sought outreach opportunities to bring the two programs together.

With support from the NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing (Athena), Duke’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Maclin Endowment Fund, Davidson worked with Kip Coonley, undergraduate laboratory manager for Duke ECE, and Adam Tokonitz, an engineering teacher at Riverside and former student teacher of Davidson’s, on creating an agenda.

More than 80 students, mostly juniors, from Riverside’s digital electronics class came to Duke on February 24 for Duke Engineering-focused tours, lunch, and a lab taught by Davidson and undergraduate teaching assistants.

“We’ve noticed that our Duke Engineering students are often lost in a lab setting in their first years because they never do anything like this in high school,” Davidson said. “Today’s lab is an actual activity done from our first-year lab course, ECE 110. We wanted to expose these high schoolers to a lab experience early on so they’re better prepared if and when they continue their engineering studies in college.”

During the lab, students worked with an Arduino platform to create circuits on a breadboard, an activity that complements the curriculum for the high schoolers.

“Because Mr. Davidson knows our program, the lab is tailored to push our students, but it’s still within their means to grasp it,” said Seth Stallings, who teaches digital electronics at Riverside. “When we get to this in a few weeks, we can say to the kids, ‘Remember we did K-maps in that lab, and now we’re going to do it ourselves.’”

The other half of the day was spent touring the Duke Engineering facilities, including Duke Engineering’s premier makerspace, The Pod, Duke’s open-to-all Innovation Co-Lab and the nanotechnology-focused Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMiF).

At SMiF, students had the opportunity to see scientists and engineers in action—both inside the cleanroom, fully gowned and fabricating devices, and outside, conducting experiments to characterize materials.

“This kind of authentic exposure to STEM professionals helps students see the field as dynamic, accessible, and within their reach,” said Emily Snell, outreach and lab engineer at SMiF, who led the tours. “The students were highly engaged, asking insightful questions about the equipment, its applications, and how they might one day access a facility like SMiF themselves. Their curiosity was a great reminder of how powerful hands-on experiences can be in sparking interest in STEM careers.”