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It was very rewarding to be a mentor for the second year at the Skills Ontario, Young Women's conference. As a mentor, the goal was to inspire young women and showcase my career area within the trades and technology. https://www.skillsontario.com/ywc I organized a tradeshow booth with several interactive displays with a team my colleagues and students. The first day was attended by Elementary students and the second day by Secondary students. This year, it was a great experience to collaborate and set up two booths adjacent to each other - one for School of Applied Technology and other for School of Media studies and IT. This I believe makes a stronger case and shows a variety of technology. . Our booth was really busy and students engaged with several displays including:
Over the summer 2017 (May - June 2017), I had the opportunity to work with several bright and young minds, through hands-on workshops in Electronics circuits.
My first experience in STEM was when I worked as a workshop leader for the outreach department at my grad school - ASU during summer. I remember well putting together kits for 'building an FM radio' and doing a presentation to represent the field of Electrical Engineering. Since then, I have always wanted to get back to doing more work in STEM. So when the opportunity of a leadership initiative came through for TEP program, this was the first thing that came to my mind - is to become an active representative of my program/cluster/school in STEM outreach. I was not sure where to start, but approached the outreach department at Humber. I was excited to see that they had many camp initiatives in place and jumped right in. I worked on three different workshop sessions:
To make a connection to real world, participants were asked to list the everyday gadgets that they have used/heard of. Some of the groups came up with 20+ devices. Then the conversation started with 'What's inside?' and they were introduced to the world of circuits.
Followed the intro, we had the paper circuits activity. In this activity, participants constructed a circuit on paper using copper tape and basic electronic components. They were excited to the see the light up. After completing the activity, participants were offered to play with some goodies....a few electronics projects/products that show the real-world application of circuits. For example - inside of a computer mouse, power adapter, electronic toy, phone, rover, etc. The paper circuits activity is an inspiration drawn from a research group at MIT media lab. I am a keen follower of the projects and research out of this lab: www.media.mit.edu/projects/paper-circuits/overview/ . See their work in the video below.
I tried out a few templates for the workshops - origami frog, robot, etc. It was fun but due to the craft involved it would be a rush to complete the electronics and the craft/coloring etc. Instead, I decided to make my own template with different variations to a basic circuit.
With a son in the same age group, I was also thinking as a parent throughout these workshops. It would be great if he gets to attend more workshops through his school in different career paths, so that he can make an informed decision about his career choice.
In addition, the event also included a guest speak panel and a keynote speech. The questions posed to the panel clearly reflected the inhibitions associated with women entering trades and technology fields, especially the non-traditional ones dominated by men. The keynote speech was given by Kayleen McCabe, a women in trades proponent and tv show host of Rescue renovations.
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Author: raji
This blog documents my adventures in STEM outreach workshops and events Archives
May 2018
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