Ladies Start: You re Engineers!

Each summer, the University of Cincinnati Women in Engineering (WIE) camp enables young women in grades 9 through 12 to explore careers in engineering as they work with University of Cincinnati faculty. This year, thanks to sponsorship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and UC’s Mechanical Engineering Department (ME), the young women were able to explore the engineering behind a Formula SAE race car.

In the annual Formula SAE® (FSAE) competition, UC’s engineering students conceive, design and fabricate a small formula-style race car, organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The UC FSAE team, Bearcat MotorSports, builds a race car from the ground up every year over a period of about 10 months. The team has been highly successful in recent years, competing against vehicles from colleges throughout the world.

 The 2008 season was especially exciting, with Bearcat MotorSports enjoying a top-ten finish five races in a row. The UC team Bearcat MotorSports finished in 8th place overall at the California Formula SAE competition, the last race of the 2008 FSAE race season. 

“UC’s Mechanical Engineering Department uses the FSAE program as a valuable engineering education opportunity in addition to the competition,” said Jay Kim, professor of mechanical engineering. He explained that he and the other ME faculty — Bob Rost, Randall Allemang and Teik Lim — organized this workshop with two graduate students as part of an NSF-sponsored research project called “Engineering education through degree-long project experience.” The two graduate students, doctoral student Shrikant Pattnaik and master’s student Fred Jabs, took the leading roles in dealing with the student groups and presented the same information twice earlier in the summer to participants of the Men in Engineering Camp and Emerging Ethnic Engineers program.

“The NSF project aims at motivating students’ learning by vertically integrating courses in the ME program with real-life engineering projects, such as FSAE,” Kim said. “This workshop is being conducted as a part of that NSF project. The workshop was used to demonstrate how engineering and science knowledge are used in building and testing FSAE race cars. Math and science are not hard concepts but exciting subjects that can be applied to very practical problems.”

The workshop was designed for young students who aspire to study engineering and science in colleges. Through simple examples related to the design and manufacture of the FSAE cars built in 2007 and 2008, the students explained the roles of math and science in real-world engineering.

Fred Jabs, a master’s student in mechanical engineering, made a PowerPoint presentation before taking the campers on a tour of the “High Bay” area. His advice ranged from the very technical to the practical — both of which will be useful to future engineers. In describing the process of the Formula SAE Competitions, Jabs said that a grueling part of each competition was the oral examination before the actual race.

“You can’t snowball them,” he said. “You can’t talk like you know what you know — because they know better than you do.” Always an important lesson for a student to learn. Jabs noted that with the Gs that the car pulls, the heat and the subsequent wear and tear on the tires, it helps to have a tire sponsor. “Y’all know what Gs are, right?” he asked. He was greeted by a bunch of blank stares. (As a teacher later explained, most of the students in the camp had gone through only their first year of high-school science, which would be biology. There aren’t too many Gs involved in dissecting frogs.)

“Well, if you drop something, like if I drop this wrench,” Jabs said, dropping the wrench, “it falls at 1 G — or 9.8 meters per second squared or 32 feet per second squared.”

After Jabs’ presentation, the group visited the High Bay area of Rhodes Hall where the cars are built. Then the fun really began. They got to try them on.

After imagining themselves taking the cars out for a test drive, the young women then came back inside for a series of exercises that tested the theory behind the cars they had just heard: an impact attenuator competition and an experiment to understand vibration as an engineering problem.

UC’s Jay Kim noted the value of giving students realistic experiences but also giving them the theoretical background as well. In fact, a 2006 report issued by the National Science Foundation, “New Formulas for America's Workforce 2: Girls in Science and Engineering,” emphasized the importance of involving young women in engineering environments so that they could picture themselves in that environment. The projects described in the report sought to change stereotypes about girls and women in the STEMM disciplines to inspire in girls and young women the “confidence, enthusiasm and persistence to continue pursuing their scientific interests,” (as one author put it).

Mariemont teacher Ken Clark pointed out that many of his students enter his physics and math classes with no problem-solving experience. Anderson physics teacher Jeff Rodriguez agreed.

“I’ve had situations where I had to push the girls to get involved,” he said, “but once they get into it, they really enjoy it.”

He and Clark were on hand watching the demonstration on a break from their teacher’s camp also being offered by the College of Engineering. “I like to build confidence up in the girls I teach,” Clark said. “I keep the standards up and I don’t patronize them. Then they say, ‘Geez, I did this all by myself!’”

This workshop was sponsored by National Science Foundation grant DUE-0633560.

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