Teaching and learning in an era of equality: an engineering program for middle school girls

The Women in Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) program at Arizona State University, USA, was founded to improve the retention and recruitment of women in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). In the summer of 1996, WISE obtained a grant from the City of Tempe to develop an engineering program targeted at middle school girls to expose them to and to interest them in engineering. This program, WISE TEAMS (Teaming Engineering Advocates with Middle School Students), was a two-day commuter program consisting of hands-on engineering activities, career information and team building exercises. Among the thirty-eight participants for TEAMS, there were twelve underrepresented minorities. The content of the program is presented in this paper.