Women encouraged to 'Engineer Our Future'

'Engineer Our Future' set-up an engineering hackathon for girls, championed by our Women in Physics, Computing, Imperial Outreach and the STEMettes

With a calendar full of fringe events, festivals and pop-up activities; Imperial leads the way when it comes to public engagement. But young people, and specifically young women, still don’t think engineering is for them.

Women currently make up only 9 % of the UK’s engineering workforce. Engineering UK estimate that by 2022 we’ll need almost 2 million more people to work as engineers: that’s 1 in 5 young people. Engineer Our Future (#EoFImperial) was designed to address this massive shortfall. Championed by the Imperial College Women in Physics group, and the Department of Computing (DoC) who joined forces with Imperial’s incredible central Outreach team and the STEMettes, they set-up an engineering inspired ‘hackathon’ for girls. The hackathon introduced girls to the creative; logical problem-solving capability of tech, and after introductory tutorials they were writing code to change the world. The hackathon lasted two-days long, welcoming fifty 14 to 16-year-old young women into the DoC computer labs.

We were fortunate enough to work with Imperial graduates “the Turing Lab” to design the academic content, teaching the girls MIT’s Scratch program through global engineering challenges such as global warming or deforestation. The hackathon teachers were all current or former Imperial College students themselves, studying a range of subjects from biomedical engineering to theoretical physics. Tanya Dhliwayo from Chelsea Academy loved the Turing Lab tutorials, which were “wonderful at refreshing my knowledge of scratch” and the “very inspiring” campus tours. The Ingenious grants aim to enable engineers to communicate how exciting their jobs are, and as part of our training we took this to the extreme; our engineers spent a morning improv & comedy with a critically acclaimed dramatic group “Do Not Adjust Your Stage”.

“Engineer Our Future” was an action packed weekend where the girls were never stuck in front of a computer screen. We were joined on our first day by Joysy John, the Chief Industry Officer at ADA College (the UK’s first centre for Digital Skills). Joysy introduced our mission; the overwhelming need for up-to-date digital skills in an ever changing employment landscape. Her enthusiasm certainly captured the young minds of our audience. Day one was made up of coding, the DoC’s biggest ever lunchtime pizza delivery, two sets of campus tours (including endless Queen’s Tower & Royal Albert Hall selfies) and a hands-on breakout session on designing water filtration systems with “Engineer’s Without Borders” to celebrate just how diverse an engineer’s career can be. After sensing the excitement build on Twitter, the president of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) even called in to check out what was going on.

Sunday morning saw two-streams running in parallel: a last minute debugging, compiling and presentation preparation session for the girls and a series of workshops and seminars for their parents and teachers. The dedication of parents and teachers to these girls’ futures was astonishing: spending Sunday morning in a lecture theatre in the Huxley Building isn’t many people’s idea of fun (even if there is free coffee). They were however more than rewarded for their efforts: technical sessions covered Imperial’s schools programmes (Dr Melanie Bottrill), science game design and publishing (Eiman Munro), “Computing At School” and online resources (Emma-Ashley Lilles) and the laws surrounding online media (Holly Powell-Jones).

Next up was a panel with Imperial students and staff; who discussed their routes to science; the image of women in scientific universities, importance of creativity and top tips to maintain young scientist’s curiosities. We were lucky enough to have the DoC Athena Swan champion, Anita Borg and London ambassador, Dr Car Fernandes share their experiences as a scientist, outreach coordinator and mother. The girls finished off their presentations and had an improv session before meeting their parents for an industry focussed panel discussion hosted by “head STEMette”, Anne-Marie Imafidon.

With 10 engineering departments, it is unsurprisingly that Imperial is pretty well connected when it comes to finding people to take part in an engineering focussed panel discussion. The final group consisted of current undergraduate students (tech innovator and bioengineer Mohima Ahmed, DoC Society secretary, James Prince, RAEng fellow and MSc Engineer Jessica Charter), Imperial alum (Kit Tsui, Deutsche Bank), Imperial collaborators (Emily Boyd, Accenture) and Jess’s co-members on the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) young women’s board (Emma Thomas, AdBio Resources, Elaine Dalgarno, Atkins Global and Vedika Dalmia, Bloomberg).

The diverse range of skills and backgrounds made for an electric 90 minutes; where our impressionable audience heard from people who’d not been afraid to make mistakes on the path to achieving their dreams. Katie from Teddington School felt honoured to see “a panel of such extraordinary women”. After our networking lunch, it was the girls’ turn to take to the lectern. Their presentations were slick, well-rehearsed and carefully loaded with technical information: a break-down how their codes worked; the real-world context and the challenges they faced.

Physics Student Ambassador, Meriame Berboucha said #EoFImperial was “everything I would have loved to have been involved in when I was at school. I could see how the girls were inspired by all these amazing women and they could relate to them which was the most important part! I could hear them talking about how they wanted to be just like the women who were presenting at the panel discussions and this was just music to my ears”.

Abbie Dhillon from the Ursuline Academy in Ilford found the weekend “extremely beneficial as I learnt many skills during a short span”, from “team work, to confidence and communication. A lot of effort was put into organising the event and I was very impressed!”. Katie from Teddington says “I loved spending my weekend at Imperial, it was one of the best weekends I have ever had, thank you so much. What a truly amazing experience. “

The winning presentations were judged by panellists, representatives from the Imperial Women in Physics community and a future Imperial aeronautical engineer. The girls were presented with popular science books, including Laura Winkless’ “Science of Cities”, Melanie Windridge’s “Aurora” and Jon Butterworth’s “Smashing Physics”. Oh, and an Imperial Maths graduate (Jenny Pasha) baked an 100-person cake shaped like the Shard (complete with a flashing light and sugar-work sail structure). All-in-all, it was a pretty sensational weekend.