IEEE Women in Engineering hosted an Engineering Day at Polished Pebbles on April 14th, 2018. Polished Pebbles is a non-profit organization dedicated to mentoring girls in a diverse verity of professions.

The event started with an icebreaker activity where each mentor and mentee received a Spring Break ‘Find Someone who’ worksheet and walked around the room to find different people who fit the requirements listed on the worksheet. This was a great way for everyone to get to know each other.

Then, Lauren White spoke to the girls about the different engineering disciplines and her journey of becoming an engineer. Lauren has a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and she is currently working as a System Engineer at Cisco Systems. Lauren is also an IEEE member and a professional communicator of technology and experiences.

After that, we formed 5 groups and started the hands-on activity where girls and volunteers made electrical circuits using Electronic Snap Circuits kits. Projects included making the following circuits: Electric Light & Switch, Flying Saucer, Alarm Circuit, Spinning Rings and Strobe the House lights, Light-Controlled Sounds, and more. Betsy Covell, Lauren White, Ivonne Friday, Dawn Fiorentino, and Nina Rouhanizadeh from IEEE WIE volunteering team lead each group along with other volunteers at Polished Pebbles.

At the end, every group announced their group names, and showed and shared what circuits they built and what their favorite projects were. The group names were: Cool Engineers, The Electrocuters, Speakers, BAR, and Power Girls. The girls were very enthusiastic about their projects and some of them mentioned that they want to be engineers.