Education Law

More engineering curriculum geared towards girls

While perusing the Washington Post this morning, BoardBuzz immediately noticed this story gracing the cover of the metro section. It turns out that the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland offers a unique course on engineering.

The Post story describes how the girls learned one day last month to build bridges out of popsicle sticks while their teachers tried to build bridges for them into the male-dominated field of engineering. “It’s about taking risks and getting them over the anxiety of always having to be right all the time,” said physics teacher Chris Lee.

The students went on to learn about the cross-structural supports that make bridges truly strong. After their bridges had been slowly destroyed using a pressure testing device, the students gathered around to watch a slow-motion video of the testing. In this fashion, students could see where the bridge failures started.

“Triangles!” said senior Veronica Leonard. “We needed more triangles.”

“The real challenges for reaching out to young women is to get over the stereotype that this isn’t something girls do and then to help them build their confidence,” said Betty Shanahan, executive director of the Society of Women Engineers.

As BoardBuzz has mentioned before, we think engineering?any field of science?can be a cool, creative, and rewarding career for girls and boys. About 17 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees were awarded to women in the 2006-07 school year according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).