STEM Program for Female High School Students
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual On line
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2020
- Start Date
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June 22, 2020
- End Date
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June 26, 2021
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Women in Engineering
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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9
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--35205
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/35205
- Download Count
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415
Paper Authors
Jiahui Song Wentworth Institute of Technology
Jiahui Song received her B.S. in Automation and M.S. in Pattern Recognition & Intelligent Systems from Southeast University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Old Dominion University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Technology at Wentworth Institute of Technology.
Douglas Eric Dow Wentworth Institute of Technology
Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (started 2008). Education B.A. in Liberal Arts Engineering from Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL); B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University (College Station, TX); M.S. in Computer Science from University of Colorado (Colorado Springs, CO); M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI). Worked in industry for about 9 years at Ampex Corporation (video systems manufacturing) in Colorado Springs CO, Panasonic (central research lab) in Osaka, Japan, and National University of Singapore (center for image enhanced medicine) in Singapore. Post Doc or Sabbatical research was done at Tohoku University (biology information systems) in Sendai, Japan, Mayo Clinic (respiration research lab) in Rochester MN, and Kansai University (knowledge information systems) in Osaka, Japan. Core focus involves embedded electronic systems for applications in medical rehabilitation, health monitoring, physical therapy and assistive technologies. This involves development of hardware and software systems with sensors, embedded control and mechanical actuators. Applications include respiration monitoring, sleep apnea, rehabilitation of impaired muscle for recovery of motor function, health monitoring for elderly to extend independent living, and diabetes management. These systems utilize internet of things (IoT) for remote communication between patient, medical staff, care-givers and instrumentation.
Gloria Guohua Ma Wentworth Institute of Technology
Gloria Ma is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Technology. She has been teaching robotics with Lego Mindstorm to ME freshmen for several years. She is actively involved in community services of offering robotics workshops to middle- and high-school girls. Her research interests are dynamics and system modeling, geometry modeling, project based engineering design, and robotics in manufacturing.
Weihui Li Biomedical Engineering, Wentworth Institute of Technology
Weihui Li received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University and her PhD from Tulane University. She was also a research fellow in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Currently, she is an associate professor in Biomedical Engineering Department in Wentworth Institute of Technology. Her research interest is in medical devices, data analysis and telemedicine.
Lili Ma New York City College of Technology
Professor Ma received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Utah State University focusing on autonomous ground vehicles. After that she did three-year post-doctoral training at Virginia Tech working with autonomous aerial vehicles. Prior to joining the Computer Engineering Technology (CET) department at City Tech in fall 2016, she taught at Wentworth Institute of Technology for many years. Professor Ma’s research areas include autonomous mobile robots, vision-based control, visual servoing, visual tracking, coordinated control, and sensing & perception techniques.
Abstract
STEM Program for Female High School Students
Despite engineering careers helping to solve problems in society and environment, and enabling financial independence, a disproportionately low number of women enter engineering careers. Contributing factors may include during the developing years lack of role models and activities that would increase the interest and confidence in STEM pathways. Our institute has initiated activities to provide exposure to role models and STEM activities to young females. Since 2016 our institute has developed a mini program "RAMP for High School Girls" to expose junior and senior high school girls to STEM fields. In the past 4 years, about 30 female students participated in the mini program each year. This year our institute started a new STEM program for freshman and sophomore female high school students from a girls’ high school. This program aimed to help female high school students explore STEM fields. The event is organized by the student chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). In each workshop, female professors talked about their experiences, and students participated in STEM-related hands-on projects, connecting them to real life applications, and boosting students' interests in different STEM disciplines. The program represents part of our university’s ongoing efforts to interest young women in STEM.
The core of the events of the day were three STEM workshops: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. There was one hour for each workshop and the students rotated between the different workshops. The three workshop lab activities are presented in this paper. Biomedical Engineering project was ECG measurement, Mechanical Engineering was making bowling pins in manufacturing center, and Electrical Engineering project was programming Arduino to get information from pressure sensors to control the color of LED lights.
14 female high school students participated in this new STEM program this year. Students were excited about our program and we got positive feedback from the students. Students reflected that they would like to participate more STEM related activities in the future.
Song, J., & Dow, D. E., & Ma, G. G., & Li, W., & Ma, L. (2020, June), STEM Program for Female High School Students Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--35205
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