![\"Roominate\"](\"https:\/\/blog-assets.solidworks.com\/uploads\/sites\/3\/Roominate2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMy interview on stage was with Bettina Chen<\/strong>, co-founder of Roominate, a construction toy targeted at girls, starting at age 6, with an emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, (STEM), creativity, and fun.<\/p>\n On stage, Bettina talked about how she got interested in engineering as a young girl, graduated from Cal Tech as an electrical engineer and while at Stanford, working on her masters in engineering, met co-founder, Alice Brooks<\/strong>, a mechanical engineer from MIT.\u00a0 Releasing there were few female engineers at Stanford, Bettina and Alice shifted their focus to what got them interested in engineering in the first place.<\/p>\n Bettina also talked about her challenges as an engineer and a woman in business.\u00a0 We focused on what the SOLIDWORKS community can do as role models and mentors, encouraging engineering girls and women engineers in business.<\/p>\n I have presented on stage with great student design teams, robots, and student certification.\u00a0 So how did the topic engineering girls come about?\u00a0 The idea actually came last year from SOLIDWORKS customer, Sol Diamond.\u00a0 We met at SOLIDWORKS WORLD San Diego.<\/p>\n Over the years, \u00a0 I met Sol Diamond<\/strong>; Professor from Dartmouth College. We discussed his research and biomedical engineering classes with 30% female graduate students, innovative freshman engineering classes with 28% female undergraduate students, students receiving SolidWorks Certification, and young engineering entrepreneur Shrini and Kristina that took an idea from a product design class and started their own company, Tray Bien.<\/p>\n Last year, in San Diego, we discussed a single topic.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sol asked \u201cWhere are the women engineers at SolidWorks World? \u201c I looked around and noticed Sol was correct. Less than 5% of the attendees were women engineers.<\/p>\n So this year we focused on our Women in Engineering Recognition program, Rachel York<\/strong>, a recipient,\u00a0 has been a user group leader, First Robotics mentor and now an advisory support engineer for our reseller,\u00a0 FisherUnitec.\u00a0 \u00a0You can nominate a woman who has contributed to the engineering field and her community by applying at www.solidworks.com\/WomenInEngineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n We talked about our new partner, the Fab Foundation and the collaboration started with FAB LABS with their support for women, girls, entrepreneurs and education.\u00a0 At present there are 340 Fab Labs, doubling every 18 months in diverse locations. Sherry Lassiter<\/strong>, director of the Fab Foundation, is leading the development of the Fab lab network, entrepreneurship, and new learning methods. \u00a0See yesterday\u2019s post.<\/p>\n In the Product showcase, we highlighted the University of Arizona Baja Racing<\/strong> team and Arizona State University EcoCAR3<\/strong> and ASU\u2019s Air Devils Design Build Fly<\/strong> team.\u00a0 SolidWorks sponsors over 2300 competitive student teams.<\/p>\n FIRST Robotics has over 20% female participation.\u00a0 FIRST is breaking the stereotypes that yes \u2013 girls can select Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) careers, work as a team, solve a problem, and communicate.\u00a0\u00a0 SolidWorks supports 800 robot teams including FRC 3504 Pittsburgh\u2019s Girls of Steel,<\/strong> FRC 1868 Space Cookies Robotics\u00a0 – Girl Scouts of Northern California<\/strong>, \u00a0& FRC 771 Ontario\u2019s SWAT St Mildred\u2019s\u00a0 Women Advancing Technology<\/strong>.<\/p>\n At SOLIDWORKS WORLD I heard great stories from our customers and resellers.\u00a0 Our Netherlands reseller CADMES<\/strong> helps out FRC 4481 Team\u00a0Rembrandt’s, <\/strong>mentors FLL robot teams and hosts many robot workshops to help students.<\/p>\n We love to share your stories from our customers,resellers, partners and user group leaders that reach out to these students and are their mentors, making a difference.<\/p>\n For your daughters, sisters, cousins, friends, colleagues,\u00a0our common goals begin by encouraging engineering girls in STEM fields and to support women engineers in your own field, in your own business, making the\u00a0SolidWorks Community even stronger for our future. \u00a0\u00a0Marie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At SOLIDWORKS WORLD yesterday,\u00a0Bri Pettis stated there were so many “dudes” in the audience.\u00a0I was fortunate to talk to our SOLIDWORKS Community about the need for us, as a community to support engineering girls.\u00a0 In order to get more women<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":6951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5500,4184,5499,5203,5380],"tags":[5562,5607,5611,4134,5610,3990,4938],"class_list":["post-6928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aerial","category-cad-instructor","category-competitions","category-current-affairs","category-stem-science-technology-engineering-and-math","tag-engineering-girls","tag-fab-labs","tag-first-robotics-frc","tag-girls","tag-roominate-toy","tag-stem","tag-women"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6928"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6961,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions\/6961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/teacher\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n