Camp partners budding inventors with UD engineers

Alisha Evans (left) and Keyanna Golphin discuss options for altering their design plans with UD engineering student Dan Duong.

1:49 p.m., July 2, 2004--Through Friday, July 9, 50 girls from across the United States are teaming with 12 UD undergraduate and graduate engineering students to brainstorm, build, invent and learn the difference, through hands-on activities, between designs that work and ones that don’t.

Spurred by national statistics citing the scarcity of girls pursuing careers in engineering, the Design & Discovery Summer Leadership Institute, a partnership between the Girl Scouts of the Chesapeake Bay Council and the University of Delaware, features workshops, activities and field trips geared for 12- to 17-year-old girls with an aptitude and interest in technology.

“Statistics consistently have shown that more women are needed in the fields of science, math and technology,” Ann Marie van den Hurk, director of communications for the Girl Scouts of the Chesapeake Bay Council, said. “The Design and Discovery Summer Leadership Institute addresses that need by offering a variety of hands-on engineering activities designed for young inventors.”

The two-week program, which was made possible by a grant from the Intel Corp., began when Michael Vaughan, assistant dean and RISE director in UD’s College of Engineering, was approached by the Girl Scouts of the Chesapeake Bay Council for grant-writing assistance. Vaughan, who serves on the council’s presidential advisory committee, enlisted help from colleagues Pamela Cook, associate dean, and Kathleen Werrell, assistant dean and outreach director, both in the College of Engineering. Cook and Werrell were instrumental in shaping the program and recruiting the 12 graduate and undergraduate student mentors who facilitate the hands-on activities.

“The program was initiated approximately one and a half years ago when we were put in contact with two leaders at Girl Scouts who needed help with grant-writing and with [securing] facilities,” Werrell said. “We worked with University scheduling officials to book the problem-based learning classrooms. Most importantly, we also recruited the engineering students who have been such great assets to the program.”

Hillari Howard shows initial sketches for her latest invention to UD engineering students Colette McGovern and Duong.

Now successfully into its first run, the Design and Discovery Summer Leadership Institute has so far instructed participants in the finer points of building switches and circuits, wiring LEDs and discerning superior design in everything from ice cream scoops to clocks to vegetable peelers to flashlights.

Such activities, in turn, have led the young engineers to independent—and ingenious—inventions of their own. One seventh-grader from Montana is designing a light sensor with an automatic trip-switch that will activate the lights in the chicken coop at dawn, thereby saving her from her 5:30 a.m. treks to the henhouse each morning.

And, according to Werrell, the ideas just keep coming. “We received the instructional materials from Intel,” she said, “but we’ve basically bought the local Radio Shack out!”

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.