The Middle School Chemical Engineering For Girls project is part of Dr. Ayse Asatekin’s CAREER Grant (CAREER: Self-Assembly of Zwitterionic Amphiphilic Copolymers for Membranes with Sharp, Tunable Pore Size # 1553661 ).
Asatekin and her research group worked with Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) to develop new outreach activities for middle school girls to engage them in multiple aspects of chemical engineering. The Tufts groups worked with the Malden YMCA to deliver the program in the summers of 2018 and 2019. The activities are documented for public use on this website. Let us know if you use them!
The goal of the activities is to expose students to the engineering design process and chemical engineering concepts, such as polymers, separations, and reactor design. The activities are designed to be informative but also fun and mostly self-directed. The first four days of the camp focus on different aspects of chemical engineering and will culminate in a final project in which students will create a company, design a product or process, and integrate the different principles and skills they have learned throughout the week. The company’s idea will be introduced to the students at the beginning of the camp to start their thinking about the different aspects they will have to consider when designing their product or process.
What Some of Our Students Have to Say…
“I wish that the program was longer because I enjoyed it so much. The staff was very helpful and I loved how they taught me things that I could have never learned without doing this program.”
Rhianon, 11, 6th grade
“My favorite experiment was probably the spherification and turning milk into plastic. That was very fun and interesting and I definitely learned a lot of stuff. The thing that definitely stands out the most was [learning about] polymers and chain-links.”
Shravya, 11, 6th grade
“What I really like about chemical engineering is that I learned new things that I probably wouldn’t have even learned in actual school. When we made soda can batteries, I learned that [in a] parallel versus series circuits, the voltage would run through different points in a parallel circuits rather than one extruding point [in a series circuit] to power a whole entire phone possibly.”
Megyn, 12, 7th grade
This camp was so much fun and I had an amazing experience. I learned so much and made lots of new friends. We did many experiments like making Alka Seltzer water rockets, developing pill coatings, spherifying things, and much more. I enjoyed this camp so much!”
Leyna, 11, 7th grade