My Story
I first developed an inclination toward engineering when I worked on Odyssey of the Mind Problem 4 in middle school and used civil engineering techniques to build a balsa wood structure of less than 15g to hold hundreds to thousands of pounds. With no Odyssey team at my high school, I focused more on math and discovered the engineering team. I went to the workshop several times and to several meetings. This year I became much more involved, taking its associated elective class. I have had the chance to build robots, learn to code, 3D print and create other design projects, and this spring we will build a car and compete in Electrathon. The class and club give me a chance to apply my knowledge from math and science fields to something new and different.
My Project
I will host 5th to 8th grade girls in an engineering club to meet alternating Saturdays for 2-3 hours at a local library branch classroom, community center, or the engineering workshop at my school. I will use resources along with my current engineering club experience with BEST Robotics, Electrathon and balsa wood structures to devise hands on projects that go along with the themes. There will be at least one guest speaker for each engineering branch, and these will mainly be women to inspire girls that they can be just as successful too.Girls will receive a handout on what they learned, instructions to replicate their project or a similar one at home, and some information on that field of engineering.
I will also lead one-week summer day camp in 2022. The summer camp will function the same as the weekly meetings, but with bigger and more involved projects. Girls will keep a logbook or engineering notebook recording the steps they took in the Engineering Design Process, which we will follow each day. They will also make a picture or write what they did each day of the camp and how it helped them learn something new.