#EngineerGirlShow highlights amazing women in engineering to inspire the next generation. This series was produced by George Retelas with his digital art students at SAE Institute.
Watch an interview with Debbie Sterling, CEO at GoldieBlox in Oakland, California.
Interview Transcript
My name is Debbie sterling and I'm the founder and CEO and engineer behind GoldieBlox, which is a toy company aimed to get little girls interested in engineering, and we're here today at GoldieBlox headquarters. This is the wacky, wild toy workshop.
Can you tell me what you did when you younger, like what toys you played with?
When I was a kid at my favorite show to watch was Double Dare and, I don't know if you've ever seen Double Dare, but it's this show that had these big huge obstacle courses that kids would run through. And I remember my mom would plan these big Double Dare birthday parties for me and my favorite part was helping her build these giant obstacle courses. And so we would just pull stuff from anywhere we could find — tires to run through the tire course and we make our own slime — that's kind of my best memory for kind of building stuff as a kid.
Who are some like, women that you look up to, fictional or real?
I think my favorite fictional female is Matilda. It was my favorite book growing up and I just loved how smart but mischievous she was. And I remember spending hours as a little girl staring at objects trying to make the move with my mind like she could. Who's your fictional role model?
I like Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens because she's so strong and she can take care of herself and she can put things, take them apart and put them back together like an engineer. What science projects did you do in high school and college?
I remember this one science project that I did in high school. There was a statewide competition to design a heat pack. And we would meet up after school every day to make the heat pack and we’d have to test different chemicals and different amounts of this and that to try to make this heat pack the hottest temperature and last the longest. And my friends and I just got so into it and we were preparing for the big presentation day, but we also wanted to come up with a whole marketing strategy for the heat pack. So we gave it a name, we made a fake TV commercial that we filmed at my friend's basement, we even choreographed a dance all about the heat pack. And so we went for the big presentation day, and the statewide competition was hilarious because nobody else made any marketing things. They just, like, stood up there and presented their heat packs. Meanwhile we really put on a show it was so much fun.