14 DAY TRIAL // We’re not being sexist when we say that the world of science and technology is currently dominated by males.
Surely, the state of affairs has much improved compared to the past, when the likes of Marie Curie would reluctantly be admitted to university, but we’d still like to see more and more girls take up science.
In an attempt to inspire young minds, graduate students Sara Chipps and Maria Paula Saba working at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) have come up with a smart idea related to how to spike girls’ interest for wearable tech and 3D printing.
But first, let’s think of a stereotype. What do little girls love best, except dolls and their little toy things?
Imitating mommy, and moms usually like to wear jewelry, girls at an early age tend to be interested and attracted to these shiny, colorful decorative items. And this, in turn, evolves towards a predilection for creativity.
So the two grad students have thought of taking advantage of this predisposition in a tech-savvy way. It’s not that girls aren't attracted to programming, video games or robotics, but they tend to prefer “creative” things and science is traditionally viewed as “analytical.”
So that's why the JewlieBOTS program has been created – to teach a new way of looking at things, a way in which beauty, fashion and technology can work in harmony.
The current JewlieBOT design represents a bracelet printed using flexible filament. The accessory is embedded with circuits and an Arduino compatible microcontroller. The bracelet is then beautified by adding flowers (made of polymer clay) with LED lights that bring about a gorgeous effect.
JewlieBOT can connect to a computer via USB or Bluetooth, and once this is achieved, the wearer can tap into the open source coding in order to customize the bracelet (for example, you can program the LEDs to flash and blink in plethora of ways).
The creators of the project admit the idea for the program came to them because they too were faced with disinterest for programming, which they considered boring and complicated.
But this distorted view originated form the fact that they weren't shown at an early age that programming could be creative.
The wearable field appears to be the perfect ecosystem where creativity meets technology and ingenuity, so opening up this universe for girls might show them all the potential that's just waiting to be tapped.
