Member of the Month, November: Donna Creighton

Donna at Girl Scout Engineering Day Fall 2012

Last semester, as a part of SWE, I had the opportunity mentor a team of girl scouts in elementary school for the Jr. FIRST LEGO League (Jr. FLL). FIRST is an organization of programs designed to engage students in STEM fields through robotics challenges and projects. In high school I participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition, so when I heard that mentors were needed for Jr. FLL, I knew I wanted to help out!

We were up for a challenge, but a fun one! In Jr. FLL, groups of students aged 6-9 are given a theme, which they then research and create a LEGO project and poster on. This year’s theme was Super Seniors and so we did a lot of research about what life was like for senior citizens. The team met once a week for a few months to talk about senior citizens and work on creating the LEGO project and poster.

The girls really loved creating things with LEGOs; you could tell they had quite the imaginations! Although I helped, along with other mentors, to facilitate the girls to work on the project and as a team, a lot of my job was to just see what they came up with. It was awesome to see how the girls were able to create their own simple machines to make their ideas come to life. In the end, they created a model showing information sources from the past and present, to show how things have changed for senior citizens. They worked really hard on their project and ended up with a great model, complete with a library, including a book that you could open and close, as well as computer with a motorized spinning chair!

It was really rewarding getting to work with these girls for Jr. FLL. While they might not be old enough to know what they want to do for a career yet, I really think their experiences with Jr. FLL will help them become more confident in themselves and their ability to succeed in technical fields someday. In the end, I think that’s what SWE is all about anyways—not forcing girls down a technical path they wouldn’t enjoy, but showing them that they have the ability to be successful in engineering. SWE is such a great organization because it not only supports women who have chosen to pursue engineering during college and throughout their career, but also reaches out to girls to get them interested in engineering.