My Story
When I was in middle school my love for engineering began. I loved looking at the intricacies of objects and finding out how they were built and how they worked. Since then as my knowledge of engineering has increased my love for engineering has grown as well. This has led me to have an increasing interest in pursuing engineering. I enjoy the creative side of such a logical field. With this newfound knowledge, I now have the ability to share. Who better to share with then other girls who are the age that I was when I began to love engineering?
I think of myself as a gifted teacher and would love to better my skills of teaching by sharing with these young girls about engineering. With a lacking amount of engineering based information being taught to students who do not specifically choose that track, I would immensely enjoy being the person to share with these girls in a sheltered, female-led environment. My experiences from Math Circle s Intro to Engineering Program along with leadership roles including in my school’s STEM club allow me to learn about engineering, experience leadership, and learn how to teach others about engineering.
My Project
I plan to start a club for middle school girls to teach them about engineering. I will focus on seven disciplines of engineering including electrical, environmental, civil, computer, mechanical, aerospace, and chemical engineering. Each discipline will be introduced by me along with a small scale project for the girls to receive some firsthand experience. For electrical engineering, I plan to have the girls create robots that gain power from batteries. For environmental engineering, the girls will be split up into teams and be challenged to clean up a mock oil spill. For civil engineering, I plan to separate the girls into groups to create the strongest bridge with local household objects. For computer engineering, the girls will be divided up into teams and challenged to do a treasure hunt, and the clues will be given to them in Morris Code. For mechanical engineering, the groups will be given the task to create the most efficient conveyor belt that can transport the most items across. Lastly, for chemical engineering, the girls will be given a solution and tasked to turn it into fresh water. Each discipline will have a second meeting where local female engineers will be invited to present their field of engineering and answer any questions that might be offered. This part of the year will be devoted to learning about engineering and the different disciplines.
For the second part of the year the girls will work on bigger experiments. For the first big project, the girls will be split up into two groups to work on creating model rockets. They will figure out how to manually put the rockets together, set up the electrical circuit, and figure out the appropriate setup needed for their rocket to propel the furthest. For the second experiment, they will be tasked with the creation of a water bowl filtration center. They will experience the building of the water bowl, the setup of the electric circuits, and figure out the correct flow of the water to keep constantly moving. In addition, they will have to figure out ways to solve environmental issues that they will face while creating the water bowl. Over this year I hope that these girls will have a better understanding about engineering and get some hands on experience with its real world application.