GCU Today:
Forget stirring gooey cookie batter.
Instead, fourth- through eighth-grade girls at Saturday’s Girl Powered STEM Workshop in Grand Canyon University’s Engineering Building stirred up a little chemistry, churning out a few batches of wonderfully flubbery, slime-like gooey gak.
Then — mind storm! — they programmed LEGO cars.
Their minds also were blown hearing about missile launches, the unfettered engineering joy of blowing up stuff, and the next generation of tank munitions called AMPs, or Advanced Multi-Purpose tank rounds.
The girls at the workshop — presented by the GCU Robotics Club and Strategic Educational Alliances and inspired by VEX Robotics’ Girl Powered initiative — bathed in the battery light-powered glow of science, technology, engineering and math at various learning stations as they were encouraged to pursue STEM careers. Women make up just 24 percent of the STEM workforce, according to VEX.
Participants also soaked up the experiences of impressively confident women engineers, such as Ashley Lochetto.
Lochetto, a direct-fire test engineer for the Army at Yuma Proving Ground and one of three speakers at the event, knows how it feels to be the only woman engineer walking into a room of male engineers.
