{"id":378,"date":"2013-04-01T10:02:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T15:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/fathertime\/?p=378"},"modified":"2013-09-02T11:32:48","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T16:32:48","slug":"here-comes-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=378","title":{"rendered":"Here Comes Science!"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I want to be an engineer when I grow up!”<\/p>\n

That’s what Hannah told me the other day when I picked her up from school. It was a Wednesday (which is an unusual day for me to pick her up), and on Wednesdays she has “clubs” after school. Last fall it was duct tape club, which meant everyone in the family \u00a0received two or three colorful wallets made entirely out of duct tape. This spring, Hannah is in her school’s rocket club, where she and six of her friends are learning about physics as they build a rocket they’ll launch on the last day of the club.<\/p>\n

\"Rocket<\/a>The week that Hannah declared her intention to be an engineer, she had contributed some key ideas to a team project. The goal was to slide a paper cup containing a marble down a length of wire and drop the marble (the “payload”) on a target on the floor. Hannah informed me that her team–all girls–hit their target, while the other team–all boys–failed in their mission.<\/p>\n

The girls were successful because Hannah realized that two paper clips were needed to attach the cup to the zipline. If only one paper clip was used, the cup would face perpendicular to the zipline, not parallel. Hannah also had the idea to attach a release cord to the bottom of the cup, so that when the cup was in position over the target, the cord could be used to tilt the cup and release the payload.<\/p>\n

Hannah’s conclusion from all this ingenuity: “I want to be an engineer when I grow up!” I’ve been careful not to convey the idea to Hannah that just because her dad is a mathematician that she has to like math. But I have to admit that a big smile broke out on my face when Hannah raved about her rocket club experience. It’s not that I necessarily want Hannah to be a mathematician or an engineer, it’s that I want Hannah to know that she can be. She’s going to receive plenty of messages from society that engineering isn’t for girls, so I’m glad that she’s had this experience to show her otherwise!<\/p>\n

After all the fun at rocket club, I decided to follow up on an idea I had a while back. I got in touch with a friend of mine who is a geologist at Vanderbilt and asked if she would show my girls what she does when she studies rocks. We couldn’t go on a field trip to Iceland, where Tamara travels once or twice a year to collect volcanic rock, but we did spend the Friday afternoon of Hannah’s spring break in Tamara’s lab at Vanderbilt. Hannah and Lily got to use a couple of very loud machines to pulverize a few rock samples, learned how to use properties like density and magnetism to separate samples into their component parts, and saw a scanning electron microscope in action. They also got to see that, yes, a girl can grow up to be a scientist. Hannah came away with a few samples of volcanic rock all the way from Iceland–and the report that “This was the best spring break ever!”<\/p>\n

I’m so glad that I can provide my girls opportunities like this. Thanks, Tamara!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I want to be an engineer when I grow up!” That’s what Hannah told me the other day when I picked her up from school. It was a Wednesday (which is an unusual day for me to pick her up), and on Wednesdays she has “clubs” after school. Last fall …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[74,28,75,59],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creativity","tag-school","tag-science","tag-spring-break","column","twocol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}