DESIGN West: Girls have more fun with engineering
DESIGN West, San Jose, CA -- I caught up with Wayne Rust shortly before presenting the Best Student Design/Design Challenge with Public Schools Award to him at the 2012 ACE Awards. Wayne mentored the prize-winning Spectacular Seven all-girl team in the recent iGEN LED Challenge. (You can see more info on the LED Challenge here.)"I've actually found that girls are the better engineers," said Wayne. "I don't know why ... I think because they don't have the need to actually try to do it as hard. They don't need to be typecast into that and so they enjoy it more."
The girls on his team were amazingly dedicated. At one point, Wayne printed out the first page of the microcontroller's data sheet to show one of the girls. She looked at it and said, "this is only page 1 of 10." Did she want to see the rest? Not only did she, but she took them home, studied them over the weekend, and came back with questions.
In the video below, Wayne talks about how he came to mentor the team, and what he got out of the experience.
Loading comments... Write a comment