High school girls experience engineering on campus

It’s no secret that women are in the minority when it comes to engineering-related fields. At the University of Illinois, approximately 20% of the students in engineering are female. But thanks to the Girls’ Adventures in Math, Engineering and Science (G.A.M.E.S.) Camp at Illinois, high school-aged girls received the chance to get a firsthand look at what options are available in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

The G.A.M.E.S program offers five different types of camps including the structures, robotics, bioengineering and chemical engineering, and GLEE (electrical engineering) camps. New this year was the GLAM camp, which focuses around materials sciences. Each of the more than 100 campers was enrolled in one of the camps during the day and shared social events at night for the duration of the week.

In the robotics camp, held in the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, the students used LEGO MINDSTORMS kits to assemble and program their robots. Tasks at first included navigating a robot over a line taped to the floor but eventually grew to robots fighting one another or searching for an object and retrieving it.

Scott Daigle, a MechSE grad student and counselor for the robotics camp, said it’s important to give young women the opportunity of a camp like this because “it’s an impressionable age.” He added that it was “nice to give somebody confidence” to be able to learn in a STEM-related field.

At the structures camp, students used cardboard and origami folding techniques to design bridges and furniture among other things. The hope was the girls could build something that was not just structurally sound, but also visually appealing.

“You can explore your creativity,” Lauren Stromberg, a structures camp counselor said. “It isn’t just about bridges and buildings.”

Girls in the robotics camp program and build their robots for the search and rescue exercise.

The bioengineering and chemical engineering camp this year focused around finding a cure to diabetes. Students learned about the condition, had to find a viable, cost-effective way to manage it and then give a presentation of their findings. The GLAM camp, meanwhile, introduced girls to finding solutions to rising energy needs. They learned to build solar cells and thermoelectric devices.

At the GLEE camp, campers learned to build FM cell phones and LED calculators. Lynford L. Goddard, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of the GLEE camp coordinators, was greatly impressed by the knowledge and insight the girls had. He noted that the design of some of the experiments and questions raised by the campers was “comparable to the depth of senior undergrads.”

To Goddard and many of the staff of the camp, the goal is simple.

“Getting more women involved is very important, their perspective is needed,” he said. “The hope is they enjoy themselves and go into a STEM field.”

Several corporations, including Abbott Laboratories, Caterpillar, John Deere, Motorola, Shell Oil, and Dynalloy Inc., sponsor the annual G.A.M.E.S. camps.