Educating a future engineer

[Travis Bendele]

I'm educating a future engineer.  He's a junior in high school (graduating May '26) and wants to earn an engineering degree.  His options for technical courses in high school are very limited.

My request for the community is a list of recommended topics, courses, and videos. 

I am including him in my project to create an arduino-controlled pellet smoker.  Through that, he'll be exposed to

• a tear-down of an off-the-shelf smoker,
• the concepts of design inputs, verification, and validation (I'm a medical device engineer, but I don't want to over-do this.)
• line coding in Python (he has no coding education, so I'll have to show him my work)
• small-signal versus power electronic components
• control systems at a very basic level
• how to not electrocute yourself when dealing with line power

I plan to encourage his parents to get him exposure to line code programming before he graduates.  I've got this video on his list of assignments:

https://youtu.be/zOjov-2OZ0E  ("Introduction to Programming and Computer Science."  Two hours)

I also had him watch a 2.5 hour introduction to Arduino, but he'll have to watch again because he wasn't ready for the depth.

In today's colleges, I really believe that a student needs to walk in already understanding these topics on day one, but it could also make a difference in getting accepted to a college to begin with.  If you had a bright individual with no formal education in engineering topics, what resources would you use to set him up for success?

[Travis Bendele]

By the way, I want to give a shout-out to SolidProfessor.  They partner with SolidWorks to provide great educational videos.  They offer much more, though including shorter series on Arduino, 3D printing, and GD&T.