Photos by Ralph Freso/GCU News
The nerves in the Grand Canyon University engineering room soared, and the buzz among the 30-plus students escalated as Dr. Michael De Gregorio, the College of Engineering and Technology’s assistant dean of engineering, started stacking weights on a bridge made of wooden ice-pop sticks.
To start, 100 grams.
Then 400 grams. 500 grams.
The tension started to grow, and when he ran out of weights and more were brought to him, De Gregorio rubbed his hands together in mad-scientist fashion. As he said later in the bridge-building activity, it’s fun to see how much weight the bridges can take before they break.
Finally, De Gregorio reached 700 grams.
But even with the weights stacked like casino coins on top of it, the bridge, gingerly taped and glued together, held steady.
Insert sigh of relief here.
“That’s a sturdy bridge!” declared De Gregorio, who donned his signature, very professorly bowtie as he tested the bridge’s weight capacity. He also took a moment to reinforce the day’s mechanical engineering lesson for the fifth through eighth graders in attendance at this week’s Design, Build, Inspire: Girls in Engineering summer camp, hosted by the college.
The model bridge, just one of about 15 completed by campers, came in at 121.5 grams before the weights were added.
“Why is that important?” he asks.
“Remember, our goal is to have the maximum efficiency,” he said, as he pointed to the formula on the screen next to him. Maximum efficiency = load held divided by bridge weight. “What we really want to do is maximize the amount of weight the bridge can hold versus how much the thing weighs.”
Not all the bridges, placed over the gap between two tables, withstood the weights as well. One of them, a covered bridge design, bent into a U-shape at a point in its thin wooden stick layer on the top.
Luckily, all passed the 700-gram weight-bearing threshold.
The bridge-design activity was just one exercise the students tackled during the three days of the engineering camp, made possible by a grant funded by the Engineering Information Foundation. The camp’s focus is on middle school girls and welcoming them into the engineering world.
The gender gap between men and women in STEM is well known, with women making up only 28.2% of the STEM global workforce in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report. In the United States, women account for about 35% of the STEM workforce, reports the WomenTech Network, with the engineering gap even wider. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that women made up roughly 16% of engineers and architects in 2023.
And according to the Society of Women Engineers, research shows that girls often stop seeing themselves in the fields of math and science by the time they reach high school.
The College of Engineering and Technology’s Design, Build, Inspire: Girls in Engineering summer camp, which offered STEM opportunities to Title I-funded schools, aims to counter those statistics.
“It’s just to expose them to the engineering field and let them know, ‘OK, this is exciting,’” said Katherine Urrutia, the college’s director of academic excellence.
The three-day camp covers a different discipline of engineering each day.
Tuesday was electrical engineering, when students created an LED nightlight using a breadboard, which is a board used to build and test electronic circuits without soldering. Wednesday focused on mechanical engineering and bridge-building, and today, students are exploring biomedical engineering with a project called "Tendon-Driven Prosthetic Finger."
“You get to work on fun projects, design cool things,” Urrutia said. “ … Hopefully that will spark someone’s interest, where they can carry that on to high school, maybe do a CTE – a career and technical education program – or get involved in their local engineering program at the high school.”
Jeniffer Madrid was one of three moms, a couple of them working remotely, in an adjacent room to the camp.
Madrid, who has taught physics and bioscience, works in the San Carlos Unified School District, which serves the San Carlos Apache Reservation. When she saw a posting about the camp on a site for teachers and noticed the word “bioengineering” associated with it, she signed up her daughter, Sophia.
The two drove from their home in Globe, Arizona, about two hours away, and are staying in town for the span of the camp.
Madrid thought her daughter might want to go home after the first session, but “She was enjoying it. She even told me, ‘Let’s tour around the campus, so that if I go here, I know what the campus looks like.’”
Sophia said she wants to be a cytologist, a medical laboratory professional who examines human cell samples to detect infectious diseases, cancer or other abnormalities. She was nudged in that direction after watching Netflix’s “Cells and More.”
During Wednesday’s bridge-building challenge, seventh-grader Sophie Ratcliff of Leading Edge Academy built an elaborate bridge with her teammate, Angelina Reyna of Grenada Elementary School, East Campus, that included a star on top for personality.
After watching De Gregorio test the first bridge, Ratcliff and Reyna weren’t sure their bridge would make the cut.
It did.
Ratcliff said her father encouraged her to join the camp.
“My father knows I’m interested in this, so he signed me up,” Ratcliff said.
Seventh grader Annabell Nelson said she came home from her last day of school. Her mom surprised her by telling her she’d be going to engineering camp.
“She put me in it because I like to do everything,” Nelson said. “I try out for every club, every sport.”
She already has a life plan that includes going to MIT. “Math? It’s my favorite subject!” she said.
And what did she love about the camp? “Everything.”
GCU Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected].
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