500 students attend science and engineering shows at Maynooth University

As part of the Electronic Engineering Department in Maynooth university's continuing support of attracting girls into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) area, a workshop and lab was attended by the Sallins Girl Group troop on Saturday.

The workshop and lab consisted of a total of 4 hours work where the Guides learnt about the basic principles of what electronics engineers do and then practised these skills to form conclusions about their work.

The morning session comprised of learning to use breadboards, an essential piece of equipment for circuit building, as well as taking measurements of voltage, current and resistance of the circuit using digital multi-meters (DMM’s).

They also worked with LED’s (Light Emitting diodes) and were able to find out the relationships between how bright the LED’s were and the number, configuration and placement of these simple components had.

With a short lunch break to refuel with some pizza, the girls were back at a second session in the afternoon using Arduino embedded controllers.

These were used to show how you can information into and out a PC. No swiping left and right here! All done with text based programming language called C. Who knew how difficult it is to get a computer to what you want it to do as opposed to what you think it should do!

This is the third year that the department has run an event just of the Girl Guides. In the past they have completed the Lego Mindstorms work shop as well as the Egg Drop and robo Sumo events.

Should your Girl Guide troop be interested in taking part in an event like this in the future you can contact Electronic Engineering Department at this address.[ https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/electronic-engineering/contact-us].