Cape Cod Technology Council Member Directory

By Teresa A. Martin

This week I was out and about to Fall River, where I was invited to the end-of-year presentation by a an amazing group of young women, high school students who developed engineering solutions at companies like Texas Instruments and Invensys.

Six teams presented the results of their work – which included projects like redesigning the weight sensor for airbag deployment in several models of cars, or improving the ice water dunk system that is part of one of Texas Instrument’s production lines.

Real hands-on engineering. Conducted by eleventh and twelfth grade girls. From Southeastern Massachusetts. Fifty-one girls on six different project teams in four different companies, to be precise.

The work is part of the Bristol Tech Prep Consortium’s Women in Technology program, which is designed to give young women real world experience in engineering and technology. Project teams are paired with a lead engineer on real design projects, which are used by the company at the end of the development cycle.

But it all wasn't deadly serious -- there was some playfulness injected into the program too. That's important, because a sense of joy is very much a part of engineering and creation. Part of finding solutions is shaking ideas up and down and looking for new ways to make them fit.

The students were competing with each other in the presentation, they created a team look (aka, ‘branding’) and they created silly acronyms names, like Team XT.R.E.M.E and S.W.E.E.T – which stands for Super Women Engaged in Engineering Technology, get it? SWEET.

The presentation of work – well done Power Point presentations, with verbal commentary from each team member – marked the end of the project cycle. If you watched these students in action, you’d want to hire them. They were confident, competent, and knowledgeable. Cornell, Wentworth, WPI, UMASS and dozens of other schools will be very lucky to have them next year. They belied the myths that: Technology is too hard and that Engineering is only for guys. NOT!!!

Engineering is a process, one that can be applied to many different types projects. What these girls internalized is the key lessons of how a group of people can solve a problem.

They spoke about the process of analyzing, of researching, of protoyping and testing. They talked about what happened when things went wrong (and they did!) and how they revised and refined their ideas. They talked about feedback and about how to use each member of their team and her inherent strengths well and effectively.

And it was grounded in reality. Cost analysis and the financial implications of design decisions were part of the development cycle. In a working company, these are very real constraints – and very real considerations.

They also proved that communications is as important as designing – that being able to present what you’ve done and explain why option A or option B is the better choice is part of the equation as well.

The program is also a strong statement about the creative ways that education, business, and community can interact for everyone’s mutual benefit: