In AWE

Bottle rockets filled the air outside Rowan Hall with a WHOOOSH!, a vapor trail marking their path as they soared up and out, 200 feet and more.

Dr.Kadlowec looks on as students make bottle rockets.

The rockets, two-liter plastic soda bottles fitted with foam fins and a hunk of clay for ballast, were a simple and entertaining project for their designers – middle school girls who might one day become actual rocket engineers.

The girls, about 150 in all, came to Rowan July 19-21 for their first exposure to hands-on, real-life, you-can-do-it, engineering.

Dr. Jennifer Kadlowec said the 11th annual Attracting Women to Engineering program was designed to spark an interest in math and science in girls at an age when, often, they veer away from those subjects.

“This program is a way to show girls how engineering helps people solve problems,” said Dr. Kadlowec, said an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Rowan’s College of Engineering.  

In the U.S., Dr. Kadlowec said, women represent fewer than 20 percent of all engineers but engineering remains a field with robust career opportunities for women.

“With greater diversity comes a broader perspective for solving problems,” said Dr. Kadlowec, an instructor for the 2011 A.W.E. program.

In addition to building rockets – which were propelled by compressed air and water – in their study of mechanical engineering, students made lip-gloss in the chemical engineering segment and studied civil engineering with a computer program for designing bridges.

Dr. Shamia Hoque, an Assistant Professor in Environmental and Civil Engineering, said the bridge design segment hooked her young students with footage from actual bridge collapses.

Students learned about the 1940 failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State and, more recently, the 2007 Mississippi River Bridge collapse in Minnesota.

“It was dramatic but the idea was to catch their attention right away,” said Dr. Hoque. “Only an engineer can turn an artist’s vision into reality, especially when it comes to major projects like bridges.”

Rowan faculty members taught all of the A.W.E. segments but mentors – mostly Rowan students but some high school students who’d been through the A.W.E. program – guided the the middle schoolers and answered questions.

Mentor Lexi Basantis, a Shawnee High School junior who thinks she wants to pursue engineering (and whose parents are both engineers, including her mother, College of Engineering Outreach Director Melanie Basantis), said she sees engineering as a career path in which she can find steady employment and a means to help people.

“I like creating things and I like technology so I think it would be a good fit,” she said.

Amanda Craparotta, an 8th grader at Eastampton Community School, said she’s always liked math and science and the A.W.E. program gave her an opportunity to consider career paths involving them.

Lift off!

“It isn’t just one thing,” she said. “We’re getting to see different sides of engineering and that makes it more interesting.”

For more information visit the College of Engineering. For a video of last year’s A.W.E. program, click here.