Let’s introduce more girls to engineering
On March 29, we welcomed 13 girls aged between 13-19 years old, to our office in Stockholm, as we took part in “Introduce A Girl to Engineering Day” (IGEday) once more. IGEday is a yearly event in Sweden where tech companies and organizations, big and small, open up their offices for girls and non-binary to get a hands-on introduction to the life of an engineer.
IGEday is an initiative by the organization Womengineer, whose goal is to inspire future female engineers with practical learning experiences. Sweden considers itself to be one of the most equal countries in the world, but out of the 120,000 members of “The Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers,” only 28% of the members were women in 2018 (from the report “Teknisk Obalans”). This is why Womengineer believe the annual event “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day” is a step in the right direction for Sweden’s future.
This year almost 2,000 girls participated in IGEday and more than 120 companies took part, Magine being one of them.
Fabian Miiro, an engineer at Magine, who supported the girls during the day shares his thoughts on the experience: “My favorite moment is definitely seeing the transformation from the ones that start off being… skeptic. They mention they surely don’t know anything about programming. And then, just 15 minutes later they are the ones that say “What if…” and “Oh, let’s try…”. To see that transformation, when someone realizes that they can to do what an engineer does, that is what this is all about to me. Because everyone can be an engineer!”
During IGEday we ventured into the programming landscape and introduced the girls to design, hardware and software, programming Arduinos using a visual programming language based on scratch.
“It was fun to watch the girls challenge claims. For example, they were asked to choose any number, so they chose a number, then they were asked to choose another number, which they did. Then they were asked to choose a new number again; the reason was that the first two numbers they chose were special, so they found out that “any number” in this case meant “any number but those two numbers” – Kadri-Annagret Petersen, Tester at Magine.
Magine is very proud and happy to have been part of IGEday and we strongly believe in its purpose, and as one of our Project Coordinators at Magine, Esther Pino, said: “Anyone can be a programmer or designer, the girls proved it that day!”
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