SWE Hartford - SWE Space Camp

SWE Space Camp Pictures

SWE Space Campership Program

Each year, the Society of Women Engineers offers an opportunity for young minority women to attend Space Camp for one week through the SWE Space Campership Program. The scholarship includes transportation to and from Space Camp, room, and meals. This Program is funded by industry and SWE internal grants. Its primary goal is to attract young minority women to engineering and science careers. This year, the Hartford SWE section recommended two candidates to the program. A total of five camperships were awarded in 2006 and one of our candidates, Ms. Heather Leask, was selected.

Heather is an 8th grade student at Fields Memorial School of American Indian descent in Bozrah, CT, who participated in the CT Science Fair in April 2006. Incidentally, she was also chosen to be our Section’s SWE Calculator recipient by Carol Coppa at the Fair. She was recently named as a 2006 Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge semifinalist. For her science fair project, she built and taught a robot to sort Lego bricks by color. This project demonstrated her ability to apply the scientific method as well as to design a solution considering the real world effects of uncertainty. She constructed experiments to see which color blocks the robots could clearly distinguish as well as what the effects of background lighting were.

The following is a message from Heather commenting on her experience at camp in August:

Dear SWE section members,

I feel really lucky to have been able to participate in the Space Camp program. When at space camp I met people from all over the world like Germany and Italy, and left camp with many new friends. At camp I got to experience what it's like to be in space because I got to work with zero gravity chairs, G-force simulators, and MMUs (Man Maneuvering Unit). We got to watch videos that told us about the Mars Rovers and living in space. During this week there was also a lot of learning involved about the rockets, space stations, and early space accomplishments. We did a few hands on experiments. We separated the liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel and saw what the different elements did when submerged with fire. I was put on a table that had a slight incline, this was used to try to imitate the effects of zero gravity on the human body. The experiment was able to recreate the effects and when the fluids all rushed to my upper body I ended up having slightly skinnier legs. Lastly we had to create a design using aluminum foil, wire, and copper that would decelerate the effect fire had on a screw with glue on the tip attaching it to the rod. In the end we participated in two hour missions, we spent a lot of time preparing for those missions. We had to select two different jobs that we would want and why we felt we were qualified. Each job came with different responsibilities which we had to fulfill during a certain time to make the mission succeed. Camp also taught us team work, my team had to work together to keep everyone on task and get every experiment done. We had little free time but when there was time to spare we got to go rock climbing or play a game with the team.

Sincerely,

Heather Leask

P.S. I've attached a few pictures from camp. The first is my friend from Hawaii in an MMU. The second is my friend from Texas she's in the "space station" we used on our missions. The third is a picture of all the military model rocket with my friend from Maryland, and the fourth is a picture of me in the 1/6th gravitational chair.

Click on the links below to view Heather’s pictures:

For information regarding this website please click here to contact our webmaster.