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Jessica Nelms

Girls in Project WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) cheer on their handmade solar powered robotic spiders during a race Thursday morning in Clemson.

Photo

Click on photo to enlarge

Jessica Nelms

A student shows off her handmade solar powered robotic spider on Thursday in Clemson.

“Women are major consumers of a lot of these products, and I think we need to be in on the creation part of it.”

— Serita Acker, director, Project WISE

CLEMSON — Only 10 percent of engineers and scientist are female. A Clemson University program, Project WISE, is trying to bolster the ratio by reaching out to middle school girls.

To increase science’s appeal, WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) illustrates the role engineers play in developing items central to youth culture.

“iPods, MySpace, the Wii video games, CDs 
 all these things we use, an engineer is involved in some kind of way,” said WISE Director Serita Acker. “Women are major consumers of a lot of these products, and I think we need to be in on the creation part of it. The basis of this camp is we feel women need to have a seat at the table.”

Clemson currently is hosting the 11th incarnation of WISE, which is a weeklong camp. The project attracts students from the Upstate, Columbia, Charleston and Georgia. Normally, WISE brings in around 60 youths. But this year, because funding for the project arrived later than usual (which impacted marketing to schools), only 30 girls signed up. Acker, the program’s director for the last eight years, said WISE turned the decrease into a positive.

“This has been my smallest camp, but it’s allowed for more individual attention,” she said.

According to Acker, 20 percent of females attending college in the U.S. major in engineering or science fields. She also said Clemson was “right at” the national figure.

To depict WISE’s impact, Acker cited paths taken by alumnae of the first camp, held in 1997. Of those 50 students, at least 50 percent of them eventually enrolled at Clemson to obtain a science or engineering degree.

“Although not all of the girls attending camp go into engineering, over half go to college to pursue their education,” Acker said.

At WISE, campers design robots and crack secret codes. They observe bypass surgery on a bovine heart and learn how GPS devices assist civil engineers. Of course, these are rising eight graders, not all of the programming is so hardcore. For example, campers design birthday parties using industrial engineering planning concepts.

Rising eight graders, usually 13- and 14-year-olds, are targeted for a specific reason.

”Studies show middle school is when girls lose interest in math and science and decide (those subjects) aren’t cool,” Acker said.

WISE is part of Clemson’s “pipeline” approach to leading females into engineering and science. Other programs, such as WISE Experience and WISE Choice, are intended for high school students and even university freshmen.

Six years ago, Clemson junior Tiffany Bowman was a RISE camper. Now, the Charleston native is studying electrical engineering at Clemson. WISE didn’t introduce Bowman to engineering — her mother Brenda Bowman was a civil engineer. But the program did help Tiffany decide which type of engineering she wanted to pursue.

It was a single activity at WISE that flipped the switch, literally.

“When I came to WISE, we built a circuit to make a light come on, and I was in love,” Bowman said. “Now I can’t look at anything without thinking, ‘How can I make this work better or faster?’”

For more information on Project WISE, visit ces.clemson.edu/wise/.