Science: It's a Girl Thing

Now that its over, something called 'relieve' is flooding me. I had a hectic weekend, trying to put things together for a short, 2 hour 15 minutes class. I thought that this ought to be easy, to talk about Industrial Engineering (IE) and what IE do, since I had been in this field for more than 6 years now. However, when I really got to work, its not as easy as I thought.

'Science: It's a Girl Thing' is a 3-day camp that Texas Tech organized every summer, for a couple years now, to introduce science to young girls. The participants age ranged from 8 - 17 years old, and of course, all girls. This is the first time College of Engineering is taking part, so benchmarking is impossible. I was the TA for the Industrial Engineering session. The professor in charge for IE was busy for that weekend because she had a grant proposal due today. So I had to prepare the short 20 minutes lecture and learn the "Push vs. Pull" game in order to facilitate it during the session.

My real problem was preparing the lecture. We have 14-year-old girls (because COE requested for it), who do not really know what is science. Imagine that you need to tell them, engineering is the "application of science and math for the better of mankind". And the worst part of all, Industrial Engineering is pretty abstract comparing to other engineering, (else, why do other engineers call us Imagineers?) there is nothing solid that we could actually SHOW it to them.

I had to avoid using all those IE terms such as operation research, production system, ergo, engineering management, time study etc cause I am pretty sure that I will lose them if I use any of those term. At last, I resolved to talk about IE by relating everything to their daily life. Instead of saying time study, I told to time themselves every morning, and tell them to eliminate things that are unnecessary and time themselves again.

I showed 2 short clips from the movie "Cheaper by the Dozen" made in 1950, where Frank Gilbreth showed his children school teacher how to take a "Scientific Bath" and also "best way to button his vest". I used a lot of pictures in my power point presentation too, since I learnt that kids nowadays are more visual than we used to be. (I am beginning to feel really OLD now) As it turned out, the presentation was OK, I got quite some laugh from my audience and I actually get connected with them in some way. They began to realize that IE is actually fun, because you can be lazy and yet get things done.

After the short lecture and the game, we gave the students a little lab tour. I am really thankful to the Ergo friends. They set up the motion study equipment and allowed all the students to experience with the machine. They had a good time playing with the motion study equipment.

We made a personalized key chain, with the double T on one side, and "College of Engineering, Industrial" and the student's name on the other side as a souvenior for the students. We used the rapid prototyping machine to do it. Drawing the parts was easy, it didn't take too much of my time. The real problem is the time it took to make it. One key chain took 45 minutes, and I need to make 7 of them. It took my whole Monday to do it. But, the students loved it, so I think its worth my time then. At least they will remember what is IE.