Today we celebrate engineer Ruth Amos! Amos won the Young Engineer for Britain prize back in 2006 and more recently has co-founded the YouTube Channel Kids Invent Stuff, which encourages young engineers to invent and make.
Learn all about her life and work from this detailed piece published by Womanthology back in 2020:
There’s a lot of research around how young people, particularly primary school age, start to form opinions around careers really early. And there are lots of schemes for older children, which are great, but there’s always that question of “Why is that still not enough?”
A new piece of research came out which showed that actually, it’s because girls form their opinion of careers really early, when they’re seven or eight, sometimes even earlier than that, so they look at these things and think they can’t do that because there aren’t women there.
Therefore, Shawn and I (Shawn also won the same engineering award as me) talked about doing something that encouraged young people into STEM and showed them the exciting things that you can do with it.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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