Mackay STEM challenge aims to inspire women
With women only making up one in 10 engineers, events where students get to make building bridges, mechanical hands and mini Mars rovers aim to inspire Mackay girls.
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Designing and building bridges, mechanical hands and mini Mars rovers were just some of the challenges more than 250 Mackay students tackled on Friday.
The challenge aimed to inspire year 10 students, particularly women, to consider careers in the science and engineering while providing a competitive environment for them to test their problem solving skills.
Holy Spirit College student Georgia Borg has been interested in the medical side of science but said engineering day had sparked a new light.
“It has always interested me a bit because I’ve always like maths and science,” Ms Borg said.
“I think engineering might be on the cards, I just came in to get more of a feel on what it’s all about.
“I didn’t know what an engineer was until very recently.”
Ms Borg said her parents had not been involved in STEM, with her father a cane contractor and her mother working in administration.
“[My interest] came out of nowhere,” she said with a laugh.
While she is not 100 per cent set on choosing engineering among her subjects for year 11 and 12, she said she was grateful for the opportunity to explore her options.
“It’s cool now to have opportunities like this, to do stuff that my grandmother would never have been able to do, even my mum,” she said.
Whitsunday Anglican College student Jasmine Salman, 15, hopes to blend her interest in STEM with her creative flair.
“My friends are the ones who introduced me to the STEM challenge, because I don’t really do engineering, but I wanted to do it with my friends,” Ms Salman said.
The aspiring game designer said she was “pretty good with science” but was more interested in humanity-based subjects and languages.
“I’m not here for the competition, I’m just here for the problem solving,” she said.
“I definitely don’t think I’m a very good problem solver, but I do enjoy it to some degree and it gives me challenges and opportunities for other types of thinking that you don’t get exposed to in school.”
Ms Salman said she was thinking of choosing specialist methods, physics, chemistry, art and literature as subjects for her senior years.
Whitsunday Anglican School deputy principal Natalie Sunner was excited for her campus to host the event and welcome the seven other schools.
“Today is about students being able to engage in engineering, but for us it’s also about our girls being able to engage in the science and engineering platform,” Ms Sunner said.
Mrs Sunner said it was about removing the “masculine stereotypes” from the fields of maths and engineering.
“We know 11 per cent of our engineers in the field are women,” Mrs Sunner said.
She said events like these, and engaging women at a younger age, would prove helpful to get more women involved in STEM.
“For our girls, in all schools, they tend to be more advanced at a younger age than our boys so the exposure for them needs to happen earlier,” she said.
The winning team of The Challenge will go on to compete at state and potentially national championships.
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