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April 6, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 11S
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| SWEET SUCCESS: Middle school girls build a tower from spaghetti and marshmallows with assistance from ME senior Minerva Pillai.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SWE
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Demonstrating an interest in math and science
Women engineers lead outreach workshops for girls
“Wow, I was so excited when I got my potato to
light up!” exclaimed one preteen girl after finishing a recent
workshop led by Berkeley Engineering students. Her enthusiasm was exactly
what ME/MSE sophomore Ting Ting Chen and IEOR senior Cathleen Vasquez
hoped to generate.
The two were part of a contingent of Berkeley women who led two engineering-related
workshops at the Expanding Your Horizons Conference on March 17. The
annual conference (one of many held across the country) provides local
middle school girls with an opportunity to participate in fun, hands-on
math and science projects led by role models like Chen and Vasquez.
The goal is to encourage the girls’ interests in these fields
with the hope that they’ll pursue careers in them.
Just 20 percent of undergraduate engineers nationwide are women. (At
Berkeley, it’s 19.6 percent.) Chen and Vasquez want to improve
those statistics and encourage more girls to follow in their footsteps.
Both remember when they were in middle school. Each knew she wanted
to go into math or science because she had an aptitude for it. But
getting the chance to do fun, hands-on projects also played a role.
“I remember I was involved in a project in middle school where
we had to build a roller coaster for oranges,” says Chen. “It
had a loop-de-loop and a jump and was very cool. Demonstrations like
that really sparked my interest in math and science.”
When Cal’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) agreed
to run a conference workshop, Chen, the club’s chair for Expanding
Your Horizons, set out to find cool projects. One was building a battery
from a potato to power an LED light bulb. Another was building a DNA
model from licorice, marshmallows and gummi bears. The third was a
timed contest between teams to build the tallest tower from uncooked
spaghetti and marshmallows.
With these projects in place, the 10 SWE volunteers were ready to hold
their workshop “SWEet Engineering.” On the day of the conference,
20 girls attended their workshop, one of 23 offered. The undergraduate
Association of Women in EECS also ran a workshop entitled “Tricks
of the Trade in Computers and Electricity,” in which participants
explored the complexities of computer science and electrical engineering
through games.
At the SWE workshop, participants rotated from project to project,
learning basic principles of genetics, structures and circuitry. Along
the way, they got to snack on their materials. The Berkeley women quickly
learned to avoid overloading their pupils with too much technical jargon
and deep explanations (they were just in middle school, after all)
and to allow the girls to work through the projects themselves, even
if it meant getting stuck and having to figure it out.
In the end, the potato battery proved to be the big hit, generating
glowing light bulbs and plenty of 12-year-old excitement.
For more information
on SWE, go to www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~swe.
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