We all engineer. From organizing our belongings to improving recipes, we’re constantly innovating, building, and designing. When we’re creating with a team, doing engineering that has the potential to make the world a better place.
We have collected a wide range of activities, videos, and professional development resources, all using approaches to interest women and girls in engineering.
Professional Development
This three-session, personal-professional development program (PD) is an opportunity for you and teams of informal educators to reflect on your own understanding of and the usefulness of engineering practices. For this PD, we define usefulness as being the perception that an object, activity, or information is relevant and can be applied to a personal goal or situation.
Additional Professional Development Resources
Activities for Youth
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and its partners have developed many hands-on activities about engineering for youth in grades 3-8.
Who is an Engineer? (discussion activity)
This discussion-based activity activates prior knowledge of engineering and challenges stereotypes about who can be an engineer.
Participants design a model offshore wind and wave energy farm to maximize the amount of energy the farm can produce.
Participants plan an efficient assembly line process to put together emergency supply kits.
Participants create model neighborhoods that incorporate green spaces, such as bioswales and parks, to prevent pollution from flowing into a river.
Participants play a card game to generate ideas for creative designs that will help different people and animals in various disaster scenarios.
Participants determine the effectiveness of various materials at isolating the base of a structure during a simulated earthquake.
Participants design an accessible path that will allow for the slowest, safest route possible down a mountain.
Participants engineer carriers to hold different objects underwater at particular depths.
Participants develop, build, and test a surgical tool to use in various model medical challenges.
Participants design and improve a gift for their class partner based on their individual needs and unique interests.
Participants design and build a zip line carrier that will move an injured or stranded person safely and quickly out of danger.
Videos for Youth
The educational series Mission Unstoppable, produced in collaboration with the IF/THEN® Gender Equity Project, introduces youth to the fun, wild world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.