Celebrating Invent Plus #EngineeringHeroes for International Women in Engineering Day
Invent Plus is an incubator project from Southampton Hub, in its third year running. Our aim through the Invent Plus project is to introduce schoolchildren to engineering, not only from a young age, but also from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. Our ultimate goal is to inspire younger generations to pursue engineering, and thus help bridge the educational inequality gap in STEM.
We believe that promoting women in engineering should start at a very young age, to encourage them to apply for University and later consider a career as engineers. To this goal, we partnered with ‘Dragonfly Day’, an initiative by the University of Southampton’s Outreach team to provide local schoolgirls with exciting engineering activities.
What are #EngineeringHeroes?
The theme for the 2021 International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) is “Engineering Heroes”, celebrating “the best, brightest and bravest women in engineering, who recognise a problem, then dare to be part of the solution”.
How are Invent Plus volunteers #EngineeringHeroes?
Although there are plenty of incredibly inspirational women that we all look up to, we wanted to look inwards, at how we’ve been heroes to countless schoolgirls this year. It’s easy to look up to people and instantly recognise them as heroes, but surprisingly challenging to look for those same traits in yourself.
This year, Invent Plus volunteers created three practical activity packs for Year 9 girls, remotely and completely from scratch! These packs introduced girls to Electronic, Acoustical, and Mechanical engineering through building electronic circuits on breadboards, with booklets to guide them throughout the process. The packs were sent to 200 schoolchildren in 9 schools throughout the UK, for a total of 600 activity packs!
The activities took place over a month, were kicked off by a plenary talk by Dr. Nisreen Alwan, MBE, and were concluded with a panel of 6 ‘Women in STEMM’, myself included. To add to all of this, we also organised an activity for SOTSEF, the Southampton Science & Engineering Festival, to further broaden the impact of Invent Plus and reach out internationally.
How can others be #EngineeringHeroes too?
This INWED, we wanted to show that it’s possible to make a difference, even as an individual, even without years of planning. You just need a cause to believe in, and what better cause than getting girls into STEM?
Encouraging more girls to pursue STEM seems like a daunting goal, so we wanted to share 5 simple tips anyone can follow — even if they’re not a part of an amazingly supportive charity like Student Hubs! The tips we picked out are:
1. Make yourself visible, especially if you’re a woman in STEM
2. Reach out to boys as well
3. Do things in person, if you can
4. Link your own passions to your STEM discipline
5. Share as many different areas of STEM as possible
Showing girls that they, too, can become successful engineers is made that much easier when they have the hard proof of their completed activity pack in front of them, and #EngineeringHeroes like Invent Plus volunteers to look up to!