Catholic Education SA (CESA) has partnered with the University of South Australia to design and facilitate a program for young female students to explore engineering careers and pathways.
Melanie O’Leary, CESA’s Middle Years Education Advisor, has collaborated with Maria Vieira from the University of South Australia’s STEM Girl’s Academy to design the bespoke pilot STEM Program for girls in Years 7 and 8.
The participating students from Kildare College, Xavier College Two Wells, St Paul’s College, Thomas More College, and St Columba College in Adelaide’s north engaged in a STEM engineering challenge, with the aim of empowering them to build their creative confidence.
Industry partner BAE Systems provided a real-world challenge - to engineer a space on naval ships which improved wellbeing onboard – which the students then designed a solution for.
BAE's engineers provided feedback on initial designs and solutions to the students who were then given the opportunity to present their final engineered designed solution to a panel of engineering and educational experts for further feedback.
Maria said this is one of the most exciting projects she has had the opportunity to work on this year.
“In this creative challenge, we were amazed by the girls’ critical and creative thinking, as well as their ability to communicate their solutions to a panel of experts.”
Throughout Term 4, students participated in two workshops at the University of South Australia Mawson Lakes Campus and an excursion hosted by BAE Systems at their shipbuilding yard at Osborne.
The girls also heard from women guest speakers working in a range of engineering fields including systems engineering, aerospace engineering, biomedical engineering, materials engineering and toured engineering facilities at the University of South Australia.
Participating students have said they did not realise there were so many different fields in engineering but since receiving real insight into what STEM means in the real world and being given the freedom to express their own ideas, they were eager to explore different engineering and STEM career pathways they had not previously considered.
“The power of this program was empowering girls to understand that STEM careers, particularly in engineering, are human centred, drawing on the ability to utilise their empathy and are also highly creative. We saw deep examples of this in all the girls’ solutions,” said Melanie.
BAE Systems now plan to share the designs with their design team who create the wellbeing spaces onboard their ships.
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