Aerospace engineering is receiving a little extra boost of energy — but we’re not talking about rocket fuel.
Rather, it’s some pink power.
Among the rockets at the Team America Rocketry Challenge outside of Washington, D.C. is a sole pink rocket belonging to one of the few all-girl teams. Typically, the color pink is lacking in the engineering field — but it is the hope of these young girls and the Aerospace Industries Association to change all of that.
Currently, there’s a dearth of women in the engineering field. A 2013 Aviation Week Workplace study found that only 24 percent of aerospace professionals are women. And according to the University of Wisconsin, only 11 percent of practicing engineers are women. And if that’s not enough bad news, 41 percent of women leave the aviation field after 10 years compared to just 10 percent of men, according to a Catalyst report.
What is the reason for this? According to Susan Lavrakas, director of workforce for the Aereospace Industries Association, it is a lack of opportunity for children, especially the ability for girls to become involved at a young age.
Lavrakas and the Association want to reach children at a younger age to expose them to the field and generate interest through participation in STEM programs. The Association spends about $160 million per year on funding programs for children and are currently reworking them to reach a younger demographic. The aim? To target children in elementary school before they have become set on a specific education and career path.
However, there is hope. In 2013, there was a 30 percent increase in women studying engineering — and there’s potential for that number to increase. Case in point: The Texas girls’ team with their pink rocket and a team of Girl Scouts from California represent a new generation of girls interested in engineering and aviation committed to their field.
Sixteen-year-old Kara Chuang is a member of the California team.
“By doing competitions like this, by promoting STEM, it introduces girls into a mainly man-dominant field,” Chuang told National Journal. “We can do just as well as them.”
Although neither of the girls’ teams won, they proved that there is room for a little pink in the engineering world, and, for women in the industry, the sky is certainly not the limit.
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Tag: engineering education
This Teacher is Helping Young Girls Literally Build Their Way to a Better Future
Emily Pilloton needed to teach fundamental social and life skills to her students, so the teacher and designer did that the only way she knew how — through an innovative, hands-on shop class.
Now, the shop class has followed her from Bertie County, N.C., to Berkeley, Calif., where she founded Camp H, an after-school camp that teaches design and building skills to girls 9 to 12 years old. Why girls? Pilloton told Slate she noticed her male students were more willing to readily tackle problems while female students usually wanted a set of directions or steps before attempting the project. “There aren’t enough spaces for girls to be together as girls doing things that feel audacious,” Pilloton told Slate. “I don’t want girls to just be given a hammer and say ‘You’re holding a hammer, that’s awesome!’ I want to teach them how to weld. And to work on projects that don’t feel artsy and craftsy. Not like straight-up wood shop, but to balance the creative and the artistic side.”
Pilloton is now teaching an after-school class that will teach girls “to fix the things that need repair, installation, and maintenance in our everyday lives,” which will include checking the air pressure in tires, fun experiments and core math and science concepts — subjects that students often become bored with during Pilloton’s target age group. In the future, the program plans to have students build furniture and lighting for women’s shelters.
“I want the projects either to have a personal connection or to teach the girls about being a citizen,” Pilloton told Slate. “I will never ever just give a girl or a student a set of plans and tell her to follow instructions.”
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How to Teach Advanced Engineering Skills With a Toy-Inspired Tech Set
Ayah Bdeir wants us to build our way toward innovation — the old fashioned way.
She is the CEO and founder of littleBits, an open-source library of small, electronic modules that look like LEGOs. The modules snap together via small magnets, and many of them contain motors or sensors, so creators are only limited by their imaginations. Bdeir was inspired when she realized that people are often afraid of technology because they might not know how it works. But with littleBits the parts are deconstructed so that users can see exactly what’s going on, and then create their own prototypes of small, but complex, machines. The pieces are simple enough that children and adults can use them. “People see electronics as mysterious or even ugly, but at littleBits we think they’re beautiful, and so all of our circuits are exposed,” Bdeir told Techonomy.com. “You can see the inner workings of the circuit and how it’s assembled.”
littleBits recently released a build-it-yourself music synthesizer, but users are engineering things that the company never even expected. “If you make something, document it,” Bdeir told Techonomy.com. “Take a picture, upload it and share it with the world and be proud of what you’ve made. We have a growing community doing that now and it’s very supportive.”
MORE: This Woman Is Inspiring the Next Generation of Female Engineers
Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?
In early January, roughly 100 Duke students did something most college students never want to do: They came back from winter break early. But they had a very good reason. Twelve undergraduate teams competed in a 48-hour challenge at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business to come up with innovative ways to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in both the U.S. and India. Their final proposals were full of inventive ideas, including a program where students would repair bicycles and a tutorial program where older students would teach younger students via video. But the first-place team went the extra mile, designing an online platform similar to Pinterest, called “STEM Pals,” which could help students gain STEM problem-solving skills while providing resources to teachers. STEM Pals would feature “lessons in a box,” kits with materials to create water filters, lamps or latrines, which could then be used to help needy neighborhoods near the schools. “We use these kits to spark an interest in project-based learning,” first-place team member Andrew De Donato told The Herald Sun. As its name suggests, the platform would also feature a pen-pal component, connecting schools in the U.S. with schools in India. De Donato and another winning-team member, Jenna Karp, said they would like to see STEM Pals come to life. The $1,500 in prize money awarded by Duke may help them do just that.