Why women engineers rock…

What happened on UCreateChange.com (19-25 Apr 2010)

Women are as inventive as men.

The Spelbots is a great example. The all-woman engineering team built robots to play soccer. The efforts of these girls paid off as they came in second at the RoboCup 2009 (Osaka). That achievement’s nothing to be sneezed at.

In fact they’ve torn apart notions that engineering is a “guy” thing. Naturally there are differences. When guys compete to showcase their ideas, women tend to be more accepting.

According to their mentor professor Andrew Williams, “There tends to be more of a social side [to it]…Teamwork basically. There’s an emphasis on collaboration, creativity, social aspects of computer science.”

In fact the social part of engineering (or related disciplines) is important for women engineers.

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Featured Video: Introducing the Spelbots

Today’s video is about robots and rock stars. At least the robot creators are “rock stars on their campus”, and they’re all women.

They’re known as the Spelbots: a team of computer scientists and engineers who build robots to compete in Robocups (the World Cup of robot soccer).

According to their mentor, Andrew Williams, their biggest strengths lie in “teamwork, collaboration, and the social aspects of engineering”. It culminated in a trip to the RoboCup Japan Open Finals (Osaka, 2009) where they lost on penalties.

PS: Check out Mr Roboto Charles’ dance moves at the 2:16 mark.

First-ever, all female, African-American RoboCup team has global impact. Professor Andrew Williams often tries to recruit undecided majors to Spelman College's computer science and dual degree engineering departments by showing off some cute and versatile robots.

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Featured Video: The Wound Pump

Danielle Zurovcik, a doctoral student at MIT, created a hand-powered suction-healing system that speeds up healing of open wounds.

To put the awesomeness of this invention in context, traditional suction-healing systems cost at least $100/day and need to be recharged every six hours. This one costs $3 to make, sustain and use.

That’s a godsend for poor places and countries. So why aren’t we seeing more of these things being invented?

Development of a Simplified Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (sNPWT) Device.

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Featured Video: Women in Tech

“Are women only good at the girly bits of tech? E.g. Social networking, blogging, vlogging.” asks Olivia from MoBuzz . 

Apparently that and more. In Spain (2:53), the top dogs of Microsoft and Google are women, and the country boasts the oldest blogger, who is also a woman.

So here’s my question to y’all: Are women only good at the girly bits of tech?

Tell us in the comments.

Today we take a look at tech in a different way - instead of talking about the boys, we´re gonna talk about the girls. The failures, the successesand what it means to be a woman in tech.

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