Girls build on engineering skills at SBC

AMHERST — Team “Mickey Mouse” wanted its musical robot to play three instruments: a music box, drum and violin string.

“Then reality came,” said Jessica Harry, who will be a high school sophomore this fall.

Harry and her partner Katherine Baker were forced to cut the violin idea because their Styrofoam Mickey Mouse-inspired robot was becoming too complex to complete during the one-week “Explore Engineering” course at Sweet Briar College.

Harry and Baker are among 22 high school girls who came to Sweet Briar this week for the introduction to engineering.

“We found out a lot of high school kids, boys and girls, don’t really know what engineering is about,” said Hank Yochum, SBC engineering program director.

“Many of them do discover they really do like it.”

The program began in 2008 as a way to encourage more young women to consider engineering, which tends to be a male-dominated field. It draws students from as far away as New York and Georgia.

The all-girl environment gives students a taste of the Sweet Briar experience, Yochum said. Sweet Briar is one of two all-women’s schools in the country with a degree-granting program in engineering.

“There’s not going to be some guy who’s going to elbow them out of the way in the machine shop,” Yochum said.

On Thursday afternoon, the machine shop smelled of saw dust, The science lab, where students fine-tuned their robots, was cluttered with paint, wood, small motors and other materials.

One team worked on its “pipe xylophone,” which will use a computerized program to play the theme song to “Hawaii 5-0.” The team members had a budget of $25 for materials, which they purchased from Lowe’s and Radio Shack.

“I never really thought about engineering before as a major, but now I’m pretty sure I want to be an engineer,” said Kate Fanta, of Remington.

Teammate Kiera Cavalleri, of New York City, came at the urging of her high school physics teacher, who would say, “it is our patriotic duty as women to become engineers.”

Their team used their problem-solving skills to perfect the xylophone, and have learned useful lessons in robot construction along the way.

“Hot glue can keep the motors from working,” said Cavalleri.

“It can fry the insides,” said Damaris Jimenez, from Charlottesville.

In addition to building the robots, the students met with SBC engineering students, faculty and professional engineers. They also toured the Glad manufacturing plant in Amherst.

Yochum said it’s too early to tell if “Explore Engineering” has made an impact on recruiting more high school students to enroll in Sweet Briar’s undergraduate engineering program. Typically, Sweet Briar has between 5 and 15 engineering majors in each class.

“It’s a nice way to pull some students into Sweet Briar who weren’t looking at it before,” Yochum said. “After next year, we’ll have a much better sense of how many students this actually helps bring to the school.”