 Girls Enter Door to Engineering Through Green Doll Houses—By Charleen Earley Published: August, 2006  Annie Priestley, wiring the solar-paneled green dollhouse. What do you get when you take 16 teenage girls to the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland and tell them they're going to build eco-friendly dollhouses, meet role models and view solar panels for the next two weeks? Future engineers of America. Normally these girls would hardly bat an eyelash at a career in engineering, based on the stereotypical, "It's for boys" admonishment, and the fact that their schools do not offer such courses. Enter Techbridge Summer Training Institute, a free summer academy and after-school program for young girls designed to attract them to science, technology, and engineering. Thanks to Techbridge and its main funder, the SD Bechtel Foundation, the gender gap in technology may shrink, especially if Catherine Priestley has anything to say about it. A junior at Berkeley High School, Priestly just finished her fourth year in the program and is decided to major in something she never would've considered before. "I never thought about science as a career. My dad pushed me into their after-school program and I'm glad he did. There are so many things I love about it, the way they focus on science. I'm seriously considering a career in engineering now!" says Priestley. "It promotes girls in self-confidence. They put us in situations that are out of our comfort zone. We had a mock career fair where we did interviews. Where else are you going to practice that?" she adds. The summer academy is in its fourth year, and Linda Kekelis, Project Director at Techbridge, says this year topped all others with its focus on green building, "because the girls can use these subject areas to improve their environment," she says. In prior years, girls worked on car and lawnmower engines, telephones, and robots. "We had the girls study their family car and look under the hoods. We are demystifying an area that might be considered 'boy,'" says Kekelis. Girls from grades 5 through 12 from various local schools gave up two weeks of their summer from June 19 to 30 to build and design green doll houses in the Galileo classroom at the Science Center, all the while increasing their knowledge in engineering, composting, landscaping, and recycling. Norma Salgado, a once shy freshman at Life Academy in Oakland, said her father is an industrial engineer and this is her first year at the summer academy. "Before, I wanted to be a surgeon. At Techbridge I started doing research and decided to combine science and engineering with medicine. I want to help sick people, to design artificial hearts and lungs," says Salgado. | ||
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