Engineers to the Rescue Girls Go Techbridge Engineers to the Rescue This Techbridge program-in-a-box allows for girls to be creative in engineering challenges within a fictional camping scenario at Yellowstone Park. Everything seems to have gone wrong because an earthquake shook your campsite: your food box fell down in a ravine, your water filtration system broke, your cell phones no longer work so you can’t call for help, and your tents have been ruined. But have no fear, engineers are near! The Society of Women Engineers just happen to be on a camping retreat next door, and they lend their help and expertise in each of the four hands-on projects. In this program-in-a-box, girls can experience some immediate situations where engineers can come to the rescue.

Engineering Design Process Throughout each activity, emphasize the engineering design process so that girls develop their resilience and eagerness to try, try again. The engineering design process will be introduced during the first hands-on activity and will continue to be utilized throughout the other projects. There are several options for the icebreaker when beginning this box. We recommend you start with the Yellowstone Brochure, the fictional “Girl’s Guide to Buffalo Ridge Campground”, and do the fun design challenge of Design Your Tool on p. 20 of the Leader’s Guide. Based on the time available and your girls’ familiarity (or lack of) with supplies available when you go camping, play the Memory Game on p. 16 of the Leader Guide and/or sing the “Goin’ On a Camping Trip” repeat-after-me song on p. 18. “Goin’ On a Camping Trip” is also included on the training DVD and YouTube if you need help singing the song.

Wind Powered Crank Stop and do the activity Wind Powered Crank (25 minutes) Wind-Powered Crank is the first design challenge, a hands-on activity in this program-in-a-box. The scenario is that your troop’s food box has fallen down in a ravine, and you need to design something to lift the box up to the higher ground. Fortunately, a group of experts is camping nearby. The Society of Women Engineers is having a retreat at the next campsite over, and they lend their expertise to help us think of a solution. How about a wind-powered crank?! Be sure to have girls read the Civil Engineer’s career card with advice on the back before they get started. [If your trainees are unsure where to begin, Show the Wind Powered Crank video on the Training DVD or YouTube.] It is important to practice constructive criticism with the girls and to remind the girls that other people’s ideas are only there to help them. It’s okay to “copy” off someone else—that’s called “iterating.” Engineers must often go through a process of trial and error in order to find what works best for their device/mechanism. Point out the Engineering Design Process poster; ask where in the design process cycle they are. After testing, ask what they’d like to re-design, or what materials they’d like to have next time. [Point out the built-in questioning written into the Leader’s Guide, and be sure to allow for reflection time with your trainees (to model what they should also do with girls) before moving on.]

Clean This Water Girls will enjoy using the variety of materials provided to build a water filter for the special recipe of contaminated water you concoct in this hands-on activity. They can use any combination of cotton and denim, coffee filters, cotton balls or gauze, pea gravel, and activated carbon that represents the charcoal ashes from that fictional campfire. The Engineering Design Process is emphasized here. Girls have two attempts to try different combinations of filtering materials. Use the Environmental Engineer career card, ask the questions in the Leader Guide throughout the activity, and allow enough time at the end for girls to reflect and report their results. [Note that each participant needs their own 16-20 ounce plastic bottle, not provided in the program-in-a-box.]

Tune In Techbridge Design challenge and fun career card quiz rolled into one Career Activity The Tune In Techbridge career activity uses all of the Career Cards in the box, so we’re going to play this game together. There’s a career card quiz, and then a design challenge. We’ll just do the career quiz in this training. We haven’t yet spent as much time looking at the career cards before playing as your girls will have, so I’ll allow you to look at all of the career cards while competing. Your goal is to earn additional tape to build an antenna tower (we want to send a rescue signal, remember?!) with by correctly identifying which career might correctly answer the questions provided on page 33 of the Leader’s Guide. You can see in these pictures that after the career card quiz, teams compete to build the tallest antenna tower out of foil, toothpicks, craft sticks and tape to support a golf ball that represents their antenna’s dish. The girls love it!

Give Me Shelter [Give Me Shelter is also included on the training DVD. ] For this design challenge activity the girls will work in pairs; one girl will act as the Geologist, the other as the Structural Engineer. Use the career cards to give each girl advice on the role she’s playing. Their challenge is to re-build their camping structure (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tent) on a pan of soil of their own design. The geologist makes the soil, and the structural engineer builds the shelter. The pair will come together for the stress tests of their soil and shelter. Will they be protected from wind, rain and shaky ground?  

Car to the Rescue Car to the Rescue is another hands-on activity in Engineers to the Rescue. Girls are challenged to build a rubber-band powered car that will carry a message out of their campsite. Important lessons about potential and kinetic energy are learned here, as girls tighten their rubber band by winding it up around the axle of their car, and then release the tension to make the car move. In this activity, we also learn that the axle has to be able to turn freely. Your girls are likely to want to glue some pieces in place, only to find out that the car won’t move if key parts are stuck in place. So, we need a cylinder that can be glued to the car’s body and the cylinder has room to allow the axle to rotate, turning the wheels.

Girl of the Year  Girl of the Year is labeled an icebreaker, but really falls at the conclusion of the box’s hands-on activities. It’s a built-in reflection time for your girls to think about their peers’ skills, creativity, and resiliency and predict a future engineering career for themselves. Reflection is a key step in the Engineering Design Process, so be sure to allow for time to have your girls tell you in their own words what they’ve experienced in this program-in-a-box, and use the reflection questions provided in the Leader’s Guide to help girls connect to the real world of engineering and problem solving.

Questions about Engineers to the Rescue? [Trainer: allow time for questions, and emphasize the pre- and post-surveys for girl users.]