RIT to Host Park & Ride: Amusement Park Design Event for Middle School Girls

Rochester Institute of Technology’s Women in Engineering Center in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering will once again host “Park & Ride: Amusement Park Design—An Engineering Workshop,” Feb. 10-11. The two-day workshop will provide 40 sixth and seventh grade girls the opportunity to engage in hands-on engineering projects and explore opportunities for women in the field of engineering.

Female engineering faculty and students will work alongside participants as they discover the multi-disciplinary engineering aspects of different types of amusement park rides, then use Lego kits to create robotic-based amusement park vehicles for a competition on Sunday, Feb. 11.

The workshop will also feature keynote speaker Molly Kearns, an industrial engineer at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and a panel discussion for the parents will focus on engineering careers for women. Sunday’s events will wrap up with the “Design Challenge,” an obstacle course where participants will test their designs.

All workshop events will be held in the James E. Gleason Engineering Building on the RIT campus. For more details, visit the website at www.rit.edu/~women, or contact program coordinator Julie Olney at (585) 475-6321 or Julie@mail.rit.edu.

Note: RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering is among the nation’s top-ranked engineering colleges. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in applied statistics, engineering science, and computer, electrical, industrial and systems, mechanical, and microelectronic engineering and a doctoral degree in microsystems engineering. RIT was the first university to offer undergraduate degrees in microelectronic and software engineering.