Ideas for my Gold Award Project

[Sarah Bowes]

Hi everyone, I am starting this thread because I need everyone's help with coming up with some ideas. I am currently working on my Girl Scout Gold Award, (for those of you not in scouts this is the highest award you can earn which involves doing a huge project.) This is were your help comes in. My project idea is to host a day to promote women in engineering. I got the project approved and now I have to plan the event.
Here is what I have so far:
• it will be for girls entering 6th grade - 9th grade
• I am going to have my robotics team there (of course) to show them what students their age can do.
• I am also going to ask one of the local Lego to come to promote more girl to join.
• I was thinking of having a women engineer come and talk
• I want there to be lots of hands on actives like:

• building a spaghetti tower

• regotta

*this is were I really need a lot of help because I want to incorporate all kind of different engineering!!

I really want this to be a repeatable project that I can pass on to my robotics team to do in the future. I need a lot of help with this!! If you have any suggestion or ideas please post them or send them to me.
Thanks Sarah

[KathieK]

You may wish to consider contacting a local chapter of a professional organization such as the Society of Women Engineers. They may be able to provide speakers and give ideas about workshops, etc. They may also be able to assist with providing media coverage.

[petek]

First, congratulations on getting this far in Girl Scouts - as a proud father of a Gold Award scout and FIRST alumni, I know it takes a lot of sustained effort and dedication.

Ideas blatantly plagarized from a workshop team 103 did for Girl Scouts as part of a "Digital Divas" day in 2002:

Electrical
- show participants how to build basic series and parallel circuits with a battery, switch, light bulbs and small motors (finally - a good use for the Mabuchi motor!). Use a breadboard for this to make it easy to make connections. Try putting circuits together wrong and have participants troubleshoot them;
- use the Mindstorm kit to learn concept of computer inputs and outputs;

Programming
- use Mindstorm kit to program simple motion and input/output such as start, go until it hits something, stop and reverse;

[tiffany34990]

CONGRAT TO YOU FOR DOING ALL THIS!!

-a common project for structural engineering is building a bridge
or another common one the egg drop...

there is a lot of different activites through ASME too.

be sure to write everything down step by step so you can share with your team and other teams here on CD.

GREAT JOB AGAIN!!!

[tiffany34990]

(sorry I forgot to add this)

The Robot Chicks Union (RCU) would love to help out in any way.

We could bring in a lot of help and support to this project with Girls FIRST, Girls Connect done by UNH.

The two hour workshop can be about FLL and LEGO robots in general. A FIRST Place Scooter can be built and a few other activites to make a bridge between the spaghetti bridge and FLL for the girls.

Please let me know if you would like us to help out in any form. The RCU mission is to reach other to girls of all ages and inspire them into fields of science and technology.