Engineering for Kids featured in Huffington Post

Dori Roberts, founder of Engineering for Kids, recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post's Blog online. She spoke about the importance of STEM education, her history in teaching, and her dedication to inspiring young adults to explore careers in engineering. Roberts cites an interesting study by the Intel Corporation which reports that 63% of teens have never considered a career in engineering, but 44% would if they knew more about it!

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Creating, Tinkering, Inventing and Imagining Our Way to the Top

By: Dori Roberts

If you were to peek through the door of most preschool classrooms or observe young children playing at home, you would likely find kids creating, tinkering, inventing and imagining. Their hands would be busy and their minds would be racing a hundred miles a minute with all different types of creative possibilities: A rollercoaster using foam pipe insulation! A rocket from a plastic water bottle! A bridge from paper and tape! These kids are engineers. Most just don't know it. Yet.

I began my career as a high school technology and engineering teacher. During that time, I witnessed amazing ideas high school students developed and implemented around engineering-related challenges. I saw firsthand how students could begin to address real-world problems with their innovation. My own son, who was 6 at the time, became very interested in the students' projects. Upon searching for an after-school STEM program for him, I realized such a thing did not exist. So, I began to dream of a program that would introduce STEM concepts to young children. In 2009, I founded Engineering for Kids, which brings science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to kids ages 4 through 14 in a fun and challenging way.

Engineering For Kids featured on MarieClaire.com

The article showcased Engineering for Kids' founder Dori Robert's background and concept inception story.  The article included research about females working in different industries to show the impact female engineers can make in the future.  In addition, the story included franchising information and how many locations are planned in 2013.

Where Our Future Female Engineers Are
By Kate Schweitzer

Who runs the world? If you were to ask, say, Beyoncé, it's an emphatic "GIRLS!" And she's right. Women have made incredible strides in the workplace in the past 50 years, and the fairer sex has even broken down the barriers of many historically male-dominated fields, like law and business. For instance, this was a record-breaking year for the Fortune 500, with 18 female CEOs now running the nation's largest corporations, up from 12 in 2011. The same growing trend exists in medicine, where now nearly half of all first-year medical students are women.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the rise in female scientists and engineers. Of recent college graduates earning an engineering degree, only 17 percent were female, which happened to be a 15-year low. The field is yet to be run by girls, but one women is trying to do something about it.

Dori Roberts is the founder of Engineering for Kids, a Virginia-based franchise that offers after-school programs, summer camps, and field trips to help children — with a special focus on girls — develop math and science skills. We spoke to Roberts, 38, about starting her own business and finding new ways to bring the engineering field to the kids' table.



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