All-Girls Engineering Camp Builds Awareness of Career Opportunities, Forges Robotics Team

A team of high school students attending the Preparing Outstanding Women for Engineering Roles camp at IUPUI are shown with the soda-can-powered vehicle the girls built for a camp competition.

INDIANAPOLIS – On opening day of a first-time engineering camp at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis 16-year-old Morgan Henry got her answers.

“Someone finally gave me an answer to the question(s), “What do engineers actually do?” Henry said. “If you are a civil engineer, what do you do? If you are a mechanical engineer, what do you do?”

Henry, who will be a junior at Pike High School this fall, was one of 22 girls from Indianapolis-area high schools who attended the Preparing Outstanding Women for Engineering Roles – or POWER – camp at IUPUI.

Open to any high school sophomore through senior girl with a grade point average of 3.2 or better, the camp was designed to expose the teens to educational and career opportunities in the engineering fields.

“One of our goals is to increase the number of underrepresented students studying engineering,” said Terri Talbert-Hatch, assistant dean for student services for the School of Engineering and Technology. “Females represent only about 10% of our engineering students. So by offering this camp, it provides opportunities for high school girls to network with other females interested in pursuing a degree in engineering as well as to meet female engineers in the workplace and current female students.”

Sponsored earlier this month by the Purdue School of Engineering & Technology at IUPUI, the campus was supported by funding and staffing from Rolls Royce.

Most girls who can master the skills needed to succeed in engineering careers usually end up in the medical professions, said camp coordinator Elaine Lawrence, the K-12 project manager for engineering employee development at Rolls Royce. There is a great need for girls to know that there is a place for them in engineering, she said.

“No one is letting them know that the engineering field is open to them,” Lawrence said. “When they think of engineering, they think of grit and dirt. They don’t think of design and testing: (they think of) just working with greasy engines. This is really an awareness camp, so that they know what engineering is about and can do a little hands-on.”

The camp did have one exciting, and unanticipated outcome.

“As a result of this camp, we will be assembling an all female FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics team to compete in the national competition next year,” Talbert-Hatch said. “Ten of the participants have already signed up to be on the team. And Rolls-Royce is interested in helping us get this team started both with helping recruit engineers to assist and monetarily.”

FIRST Robotics is a multinational competition in which high school students team with professionals to build and test robots capable of performing a specific task. This year more than 28,000 students on more than 1,125 teams representing seven countries are expected to compete in 33 FIRST regional events.

During the second day of the POWER camp, the girls attended a robotics competition at a local high school. On the IUPUI campus, the girls held a camp competition during which they worked in teams to build a vehicle that could travel a given distance propelled by a soda can. Camp lab classes covered fuel cell concept cars, neuron behavior, biometrics and digital forensics.

Although Henry has an interest in medicine, she is still researching career choices and said the camp opened her eyes to the possibilities in engineering.

“It seems you can do a lot of different things with engineering,” she said. “I could be a biomechanical engineer or go into forensics.”

This year’s camp at IUPUI drew students from 15 Indianapolis-area public and private schools. Organizers hope the camp, the first all-girl camp of its kind in Indianapolis, will become an annual event.

“The evaluations indicate that not only should this be an annual event, but it should be longer,” said Talbert-Hatch.

Lawrence is also hopeful that some of the campers will eventually participate in the Rolls Royce high school internship program that offers seniors the opportunity to work alongside Rolls Royce employees while earning high school credit.

The interns don’t just shadow their professional mentors, they actually are taught how to work as engineers, Lawrence said. Participating in the high school internship program is also the only way for students to enroll in the Rolls Royce-Purdue University co-op program at IUPUI during their freshman year rather than waiting until their sophomore year.