My Story
My family has been involved in science for as long as I can remember. My mother is a science teacher at Donald elementary, and she’s always worked to introduce fun labs to my sister and me. My dad is a salesman, but he loves meteorology and is constantly watching the weather. I’ll never forget how my mom taught my sister and I the moon stages in elementary school, asking us every night what stage we thought it was in. Most of my cousins are also science lovers and engineers, and I’ve always been encouraged to go into a STEM field and attend summer engineering camps.
When I first heard about the EngineerGirl ambassadors, I was a bit skeptical. I didn’t feel qualified to tell kids about a field I had never worked in. But as I thought about my personal engineering story, I realized that most of the engineering camps that got me excited about STEM were taught by girls, not women. For me, a girl who isn’t a professional engineer teaching you things about it illustrates how anyone can be an engineer, not just the experts. I used to tell myself engineering would make sense as I got older, but why can’t it make sense to these girls while they’re still young? If we explain it early on while girls are still dreaming and deciding what is and isn’t important to them, we can inspire many more girls to go into the invigorating field of STEM.
My Project
My project will be an after-school club for the STEM squad girls of Flower Mound Elementary. The main focus of the club will be LEGO Mindstorms and robotics, and the girls will learn how to work in teams to build a robot that will accomplish a certain task. On top of that, we would have guest speakers at least once a month (hopefully every meeting) give a talk about the different types of engineering. To keep the girls interested, I’ll also have fun little activities-- either in place of the robots or before we work on them-- each week. These activities would be things I’ve learned from engineering camps, such as cars that run from a balloon deflating on the back of them or designing different types of paper airplanes.
The girls will work in groups of four to five to encourage leadership and cooperation. In the little challenges, a time limit would be present, pushing them to work quickly and efficiently. We’d also incorporate friendly competitions; the goal would be to push the girls’ comfort zones and imaginations. Being presented with a challenge and having to create an original solution is a great picture of what engineering is like.
Guest speakers will help the girls understand what an engineer does and what types of engineering are available. One of the objectives of this project is to give girls a more diverse understanding of what engineering is, and one of the best ways to do that is to simply have people from many different fields come to talk. The idea of becoming an engineer can seem daunting, but when someone takes the time to explain and teach it, the excitement of the field shines through.
After the guest speaker and activity, the girls would get the rest of the time to work on their LEGO robot. LEGO Mindstorms is a super fun way to dive into robotics. They can be programmed with either block-coding or actually code, so it could function as a bridge between the two for the girls with a deeper understanding. These robots can also run through obstacle courses, which we would likely program ours to do. This would provide the girls with an ongoing challenge over several weeks that they could work on, and it’d help them branch out and try new things. Working on such a big project is also another perfect plug for group work. Bouncing ideas off of one another is the easiest way to build something of this magnitude.