By Chaz Wilson
While most students fled Lubbock last week to unwind for spring break, members of the Texas Tech chapter of the Society of Women Engineers traveled to Costa Rica to spread awareness of math and science in higher education.
Engineering can seem daunting to a high school student, so SWE teamed up with the University of Costa Rica to change this stereotype. They put on a weeklong workshop, familiarizing high school students with the basics of engineering.
Amanda Metzler, the president of Tech’s SWE chapter, said the goal was to persuade high school students in Costa Rica to consider engineering by learning what engineers actually do. This information can be difficult to come across in Costa Rica.
The SWE group partnered with the University of Costa Rica to host the workshop.
“They don’t have any outreach events like we do in the U.S,” Metzler said.
Jennifer Harris, SWE’s secretary, attended the trip and said the event was composed of three different workshops dealing with multiple branches of engineering.
“One was a software workshop, where kids programmed an app for their phone,” Harris said. “Another was a recycling workshop, where they devised a way to separate three different materials. And lastly, there was a civil and mechanical workshop where they tried to build a structure from straws and clay to withstand an earthquake.”
Each event was geared to demonstrate how creativity fuels most ideas in the field.
Estefani Ruiz was in charge of the civil and mechanical workshop. She said the students’ ability to generate ideas was her favorite part. While supervising the workshop, Ruiz would see a group working on one idea, but then a few minutes later the same group would go with a completely new idea after the previous one failed.
“It was pretty interesting to see the ideas the students came up with for the structures to have them withstand an earthquake,” Ruiz said.
Metzler said the high school students also benefitted from being able to ask the college students questions about engineering. She could tell the kids were getting something out of the event.
Students got hands-on engineering experience at the workshop.
“Walking around all of the workshops, I could see they were all having fun building with their hands and learning about different kinds of engineering,” she said.
The event was successful not only because it encouraged high school students in Costa Rica to major in engineering, Metzler said, but also because of it had a cultural significance for everyone involved.
“It exposed the University of Costa Rica and Tech students to each other’s cultures,” she said.
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