Unlike the scene in most college engineering classrooms, more than half of the students at the recent Engineering Fun workshop at the Community House in Hinsdale were girls, which delighted the sponsors.
Boys also participated, but the aim of the workshop, sponsored by the American Association of University Women, was to give elementary-age girls exposure to the engineering profession.
“We’ve really pushed the gender-equity issue,” Hinsdale AAUW President Linda Henning-Cohen said. “It’s easy to have girls channeled into certain directions by the time they reach high school.
“What we want to do is give very young girls an idea of what an engineer does. If they see that they have an interest, then, hopefully, that they will take math and science courses through high school and college.”
About 25 kindergarten through 3rd-grade pupils, mostly from Hinsdale District 181 schools, were led through the engineering process. They designed and built wooden-block towers, just as adult engineers would tackle a project.
“I always start by asking them to point out things that were designed by an engineer,” workshop leader Lee Sullivan of Clarendon Hills said. “For example, I tell them that the ceiling is held up because of the plans devised by a structural engineer. The electricity, the plumbing were all designed by an engineer.”
Unlike a toddler’s free-form play with blocks, the young people had to draft tower designs on graph paper, construct the towers and then analyze the results.
“We measure how tall and wide each tower is and compare how each tower’s blocks are distributed,” Hill said. “Depending on the age of the group, I might also say that each block is worth $10,000 and then we’ll calculate how many millions each tower costs. That affects the design. I’ve seen some teams make very simple and elegant towers.
“Of course there’s always one group which just tries to build the tallest.”
Hill has written several engineering textbooks for grade-school children.
Even though computer literacy is a key to success in the engineering profession, Hill believes that hands-on building is essential for exercising abstract thinking skills.
“I did one workshop where there was an 8-year-old girl who kept trying to balance a triangle block on the point even though it fell every time. I kept thinking, `How is she going to understand how to balance an equation if she doesn’t know how to balance blocks?’ That comes up in algebra: The basis for all math comes from learning to manipulate objects,” Hill said, who added that children learn more about math principles from playing with blocks than from computer games.
