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UA Engineering Offers First Search-and-Rescue STEM Camp for Girls

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UA Engineering Offers First Search-and-Rescue STEM Camp for Girls

July 3, 2014
The University of Arizona College of Engineering, in partnership with Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona, is holding its first-ever Imagine IT camp, a summer program for girls designed around search-and-rescue scenarios.

It’s not necessarily true that if you build it, they will come, at least not when it comes to girls and STEM programs. Getting girls engaged in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- has long been a challenge for K-12 and higher education institutions.

To help counter the trend, the University of Arizona College of Engineering, in partnership with Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona, will hold its first-ever Imagine IT camp July 6 through July 11, 2014. Designed around search-and-rescue scenarios, the residential camp for middle school girls takes into consideration what girls are interested in learning and how they tend to operate.

“We know giving things a bigger purpose helps engage girls,” said Michelle Higgins, senior director of STEM and education relations for Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona. “Most girls want to go into career fields where they are helping someone, and they do not always make the connection between engineering and helping people. They are very interested in social issues, so our programs and activities focus on how STEM makes the world a better place.”

During their week on campus, about 25 girls from throughout Southern Arizona will explore natural disaster scenarios ranging from forest fires and floods to earthquakes and tornadoes.

In one of the camp activities, girls will design backpacks for search-and-rescue animals. In another, they will design and build PVC piping shelters that can be easily packaged and transported and quickly set up for disaster victims. And each team will program and build a robot from scratch for a specific search-and-rescue need.

“They will learn how to conceptualize and implement the fundamentals of engineering in a robotics setting,” said Ted Gatchell, coordinator of recruitment, retention and outreach at the College of Engineering. “They will partner mechanical components such as motors and gears with electrical components and use several programming languages to form a working autonomous search-and-rescue robot.”

Because research shows girls are not as likely to thrive in competitive STEM environments and prefer a cooperative approach to problem solving, all camp activities and projects will take place in groups.

“In general, girls prefer a collaborative leadership style, rather than the traditional, top-down, command-and-control approach,” said Girl Scouts of the USA CEO Anna Maria Chávez, who earned her juris doctorate at the UA. “The cooperative learning process gives girls the opportunity to develop leadership and STEM skills in a way that feels comfortable and natural for them.”

While the number of women entering many engineering fields has increased over the last decade, electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering remain a hard sell to girls.

“So we are emphasizing computer programming and mechanical engineering, fields that still do not have as many women going into them as some of the other STEM fields,” said Higgins.

Among special guests at the camp will be Tucson Fire Capt. Diane Benson, who will talk about how communications technology has changed firefighting and search-and-rescue missions, and Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who will discuss the economic impact of engineering and how STEM fields make society better.

Instrumental in developing the curriculum for the camp were Katherine Salthouse, Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona STEM coordinator, Scott Weiler, a teacher at Amphitheater Middle School in Tucson, and Nikitha Ramohalli, a UA electrical and computer engineering student.

“They really brought this camp to life,” said Gatchell.

Scholarship support for the camp is being provided by the American Association of University Women, and program costs are funded by Intel. The camp will be staffed by female College of Engineering undergraduates, Girl Scouts STEM program experts, and representatives from the Girl Scouts Social Justice program, which works with at-risk girls.

“Partnering with the UA College of Engineering and Girls Scouts to inspire more girls to become engineers, make a difference and change the world, is a win-win,” said Cathleen Barton, Southwest education manager for Intel.