By Jessica Baker | Communications Manager
Recently, Christine Schindler, head of Girls Engineering Change, purchased engineering Kits to help introduce girls to key engineering concepts! These Kits are designed to give young students a hands-on experience as they assemble the Kits in small groups and answer questions about how their new device works.
If students assemble a Heart Rate Monitor Kit, for example, they first learn some anatomy. Why would doctors want to know a patient’s heart rate? What is arrhythmia? Then they get into the engineering! Using resistors, capacitors, and sensors, students build working heart rate monitors. The activity’s handouts include detailed descriptions and pictures explaining how each part of the heart rate monitor functions. The optical sensor works, the handout tells us, by picking up changes in the LED light reflecting off our finger bones. Those changes are caused by our pulse expanding the diameter of our arteries, allowing the optical sensor to read our heart rate.
The Heart Rate Monitor and EWH’s other STEM activities all aim to teach kids about health, biomedical engineering, and global health issues. They encourage students to think about how technology interacts with our anatomy, and how we can create better technology to improve our health. Furthermore, these activities show students how engineering can be used to find solutions to global health problems.
Thank you so much for your support as we strive to bring STEM to more girls in North Carlina!
By Jessica Baker | Communications Manager
By Jessica Baker | Development Manager
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