Edgewood Event Encourages Girls To Envision Engineering As A Career
Edgewood Event Encourages Girls To Envision Engineering As A Career
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Jackie Gorski-jgorski@timesuniononline.com
Edgewood Event Encourages Girls To Envision Engineering As A CareerFifty-three Edgewood Middle School girls were able to participate in the fifth “Forget Princess, I want to be an Engineer” event Thursday.
“We are trying to promote girls to think about engineering. It doesn’t mean they have to do it, doesn’t mean they have to take a class in it, doesn’t mean anything other than an interest. So hopefully, it sparks an interest whether they decide to take more engineer classes at Edgewood or go to the high school level or a career,” Edgewood Project Lead The Way teacher Abbi Richcreek said.
Anna Baer, with the city of Fort Wayne - Public Works and the Society of Women Engineers, said women in engineering is slowly increasing and any female who goes into engineering won’t be alone by any means. There’s different paths that go into engineering and other interests can be used, whether that’s art or music or something else.
Michelle Holz, of Purina Animal Nutrition, said she chose engineering in college because she knew there was a lot of options in the field and it opened a lot of doors. She ended up choosing biological engineering and the classes ended up being really fun.
During Thursday’s event, students participated in a hands-on engineering challenge.
The challenge was to take two eggs, put them in a wooden car and have them go down a ramp and hit a block. The goal was to have the eggs not crack.
“This is a hands-on project. They will be working with a mentor. We have 15 female engineers that are coming in from our community and they are specifically assigned to a small group and they are working with that small group to make a project and they will see how successful they are or unsuccessful they could be. It’s OK. It’s nothing they’re graded on. It’s all for fun. However, if both of their eggs survive, they get the premier sacred unicorn, the unicorn trophy I guess,” Richcreek said.
During the event, Richcreek gave directions to students, which included they could not glue the eggs to the car and they could not alter the speed of the car.
Girls can participate in the event one time, but there were girls who participated in last year’s event who were helping in Thursday’s event.
Edgewood eighth-grader Ariana Harmon said she really enjoyed the program last year. She came back to help with this year’s event because she wanted to see other people’s design compared to what she did last year.
She last year’s event piqued her interest in engineering because engineering isn’t just math, but there is a process that can be used to figure things out. She said she hopes the girls in this year’s event are interested in engineering after this because the event is fun thing to do.
