Outreach - Recap and Upcoming Events - November 2010

Girls BEST Recap

On Saturday October 9th, a group of SWE-MN volunteers spoke to a group of young women at the annual girls BEST Convening held at Dunwoody College in Minneapolis. Girls BEST (girls Building Economic Success Together) is a fund of the Women’s Foundation of MN which is focused on grant making to girl led/driven programs which serve under served/under represented girls ages 10-18 throughout MN.

The SWE-MN Outreach group spent some time introducing the girls to engineering by telling them what we do as engineers, sharing with them what kind of education is required to be an engineer, and expanding on the reasons why someone would want to be an engineer. We had a lot of great conversation and were able to get in a lot of question and answer time.

After our presentation, we divided the girls into teams and participated in a communication activity involving Lego’s. Each girl had an assigned role of a customer, a builder, or a designer. The objective of the activity was to have the builder correctly build a Lego structure with only verbal instructions from the designers. The designers were only given verbal instructions from the customer who was in charge of the final product. Only 2 out of 8 teams were successful on the 1st try. Afterwards, we had a discussion with the girls on what worked and what didn’t and why communication and teamwork was so important.

~Sara, Lesley, Kalyani, Amy, Cassie~

GSPD Recap 

This year’s Girl Scout Patch Day was excellent! On Saturday October 30th we hosted 130 Girl Scouts, along with their parents and troop leaders for Zoom! Into Engineering!
This year we had over 35 volunteers help in preparation, set-up and execution of the event! We could not have done this event with all of wonderful volunteers. THANK YOU! 

Special thanks to Boston Scientific for providing the funding for this great event for the 8th year in a row!

Silly Putty: Girl Scouts were able to combine household ingredients (Borax, water, glue, and food coloring) to turn molecules into polymers! The elastic properties of the silly putty showed the girls that when certain substances are combined (in a specific order), a change occurs and a product is yielded. The girls made their putty in a variety of beautiful shades; as they explored the material properties of the putty, they compared their creation to properties of commercial silly putty.
Bug Circuits: Circuit Bugs are simple little electro-mechanical insects that respond to movement, wind, and vibrations by blinking their LED (light-emitting diode) eyes. This experiment allowed the girls to bring out their creative sides. They first designed a bug with pipe cleaners; then it was on to the engineering! They created a circuit with a coin-cell battery, copper tubing, music wire and colored LEDS. They then attached the circuit on their bugs and learned that when the circuit was closed, the eyes lit up!
Egg Mobile: In the Egg Mobile car design activity, girl’s experienced working in a team to solve an automotive engineering design problem. Each team designed a vehicle to transport a raw egg to safety in both a speed challenge and a downhill crash test! This challenge involved budgeting, material selection, design, safety and teamwork to bring the team to victory. Fun was had by all as the cars raced and, luckily for the cleanup, only one or two eggs were broken!
Oil Spill: In light of the recent Gulf oil spill, the girls each created a mini oil spill of their own to develop greater understanding of the challenges posed by oil cleanup and risks to our environment. They investigated clean-up and containment options like environmental engineers through trial with several different materials. They also learned the difficulty of cleaning oil from wildlife by cleaning off a feather - the only successful way was to wash the feathers with soapy water!
Parents’ Track: In addition to teaching 130 Girl Scouts about engineering, SWE-MN also reached out to over 40 parents! A parent session was held at the event and led by SWE-MN volunteers. The parents were introduced to the World of STEM and challenged to go beyond GSPD and do more! Parents were told that SWE can be a resource at any age group and encourage them to get involved. This year, we also hosted a college admissions panel to start exposing parents to the joys and challenges of choosing the right school. The parents then got to do a little engineering on their own! They made lip gloss and were given the recipe to do with their girls at a future troop meeting. The parents left the session with a better understanding of how to reach out to their own kids and most importantly why it is important to promote Women in Engineering!