IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014 - 48

McManes says that Fisher's software background makes her invaluable on the committee that is developing and launching a Web site called
AppeFeat (sounds like "appy feet"). The
site (http://appefeat.org) is part of a
two-year global initiative that matches
engineers with organizations to solve
problems. People can submit problems
to be solved with a mobile app, and
designers can select a problems and
submit designs.
On the Web site, IEEE-USA is sponsoring a three-month Global App Development Contest in conjunction with
Eweek for 13-18 year olds and another
for students 18+ that address problems
with subjects such as animals, energy,
communication, and medicine.
Fisher just completed a sevenmonth pilot "Engineering A mbassadors" program in Maine, working
together with engineers, technology
gurus from Texas Instruments, and
STEM leaders to create a program that
matches engineers with K-12 teachers
in the Portland area. Fisher said that
having teachers and engineers meet
each other in person at the kickoff
meeting helped the engineer feel more
comfortable going into the teacher's
classroom. Excited about the terrific
success in their first city, Fisher is
going to help roll the program out to
other areas in Maine and other parts
of the country.
"When I first started with IEEE,
there wasn't a lot of catchy collateral to give to students or leave with
teachers," she says. She came up with
the idea of designing and producing
a glossy bookmark that gives ideas
of what classes to take to get ready
for engineering and how to find out
if engineering is interesting. "They
have been hugely popular," Fisher
explains. At the USA Science and Engineering Festival in 2012 in Washington, D.C., which Fisher coordinates
for IEEE-USA, "we handed out more
than 10,000 bookmarks. Kids come
back and get more for their brothers,
sisters, and friends."
- Debbie Sniderman

IEEE women in engineering magazine

Grooming Future Engineers

All-girls robotics team thrives
A new robotics team at the all-girls high
school at St. Mary's Academy (SMA) in
Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, is making
waves in the robotics community. The
SMAbotics team attended its first competitions in 2013 and 2014 and did well
enough to compete in regionals in its
first year. The team had a mix of eight
girls in its first year, mainly juniors and
seniors, and at the beginning of the
team's second year more than 20 with
a wide range of interests will participate.
The robotics team offers the girls
learn-as-you-go instruction and an
independent environment to design and
build robots for various challenges. Girls
calculate, program, build things, and
document the design process in engineering notebooks.
The team meets three to four times
a week after school and more often right
before competitions. It has outgrown
meeting in its advisor's classroom for
its second year and, thanks to additional funding from the school, moved
to its own workshop. Students spent
the summer of 2014 setting it up, buildDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2014.2353313
Date of publication: 7 November 2014

ing benches, getting tools, and training
everyone how to use them.
The team's advisor, Dave Gesler, was a
new high school teacher at SMA who formerly worked as a mechanical engineer.
He brought skills, tools, and an enthusiasm for engineering to the students and
encouraged them to participate outside
the classroom.

Motivated Founders
Everyone at SMA has to join a club. Morgan Wagner started her own robotics
and engineering club when she was a
sophomore. In the club, students learned
the basics of Arduino and worked on fun
projects like how to make lights flash
or make something move. But she was
ready and interested in doing more. So
she joined the newly formed SMAbotics
team in her junior year.
She thought it would be a good opportunity to build, something she had never
done before, and the experience her club
brought was a good introduction. "The
clubs at St Mary's are student run, so
you have to know how to do something
in order to teach someone else," Wagner
explains. "On the SMAbotics team I could
learn more, and it worked out well. It is
a good opportunity to learn how to lead,
use math and science, and build things."
Wagner spent the summer between her
junior and senior year working as an

The solar-powered water purification system built by SMAbotics team members for
the Solar Competition at its 2014 IEEE Solar Day. It works by using both passive
and active solar to heat water and distill impurities.

DeCEMBER 2014

http://www.appefeat.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2014