Girls-Only Engineering Camp Concludes With Design Showcase

Girls from a dozen communities, including North Andover, around Massachusetts spent the week at UMass Lowell trying their hand at engineering.

At UMass Lowell’s “Engineering for Sustainability” camp, students learned how to apply engineering concepts in areas of renewable energy, recycling, water treatment and the reduction of toxic substances in business and everyday life.

Open only to female high-school students, the camp’s goals also include helping them explore engineering as a possible career. While women represent 47 percent of the nation’s total workforce, they make up less than a quarter of the workers in many engineering and science occupations, according to statistics from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Labor.

Just over a dozen students from Andover, Bridgewater, Chelmsford, Groton, Lawrence, Lowell, North Andover, Northborough, Shrewsbury, Tyngsboro, West Boylston and West Newbury participated in the camp.

The camp, which runs through Friday, includes design-and-build team projects like an inexpensive water-purification system, an electricity-generating wind turbine, a system to generate energy from waste, a model home that uses solar power and environmentally friendly materials for use in cleaning. Daily “tech talks” with UMass Lowell faculty researchers from the Francis College of Engineering and other experts are featured, along with tours of locations around the community to see sustainability in action.

Representatives of UMass Lowell’s DifferenceMaker Program taught the high-schoolers about entrepreneurship and how to develop and pitch ideas to solve business, community and other issues.

On Friday, student teams will compete for awards when they showcase their projects for peers, parents and faculty, and pitch them to a panel of judges.

Photo Credit: UMASS Lowell