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Smith Hosts National Conference On Diversity Congresswoman's Papers Come to Smith Smith Voices Heard in New Volume New Book Restores Credit to Sophia Smith ............................

Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Robotics Associate professor Doreen Weinberger was struggling. The course was engineering, the topic was torque and the hurdle was both gender and generation. "Anybody here ever changed a tire?" she asked the room full of teenage girls. Silence. "Ever used a tire iron? Ever seen a lug nut?" One tentative hand rose, halfway. Weinberger tried a different approach. "Okay, imagine a bug sitting on a record album as it spins around." Blank stares and then an eruption of giggles. Bugs are funny, but funnier still are LP records, which to the CD generation are as quaint as women's bloomers or rotary phones. In the end, after some quick blackboard diagrams and explanatory gestures, a general sensibility for science overcame the unfamiliar metaphors and the concept of torque was assimilated by all. Weinberger was pleased. "This was a perfect lesson," she said. "After all, in the real world of engineering, nothing ever works the first time." ............................ The real world of engineering may have seemed a world away from the Lego-strewn lab benches at the east end of Burton Hall basement this summer, but to the 14 high school girls in "Designing Intelligent Robots," the first-ever engineering course in the Smith Summer Science Program, the business of invention formed the rhythm of their days. Working in teams, their conversations peppered with talk of worm gears and transmitters, friction and translational motion, the students used components from Lego MindStorm kits to build multi-colored, many-limbed robots and then programmed them to carry out their whims. As the two-week course drew to a close, dozens of false starts and back-to-the-drawing-board moments culminated in realized inventions. Their professors watched, their parents cheered and their robots performed. One team's creature danced, after a fashion; another plinked out "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the piano; one collected trash; yet another cruised around, solar panels rotating, emulating the functions of NASA's Mars Pathfinder. While building and programming formed the heart of the curriculum, instructor Ileana Streinu, assistant professor of computer science, made sure that the process of the course, as well as its content, reflected the real experiences of an engineer today. Before embarking on their own projects, students were encouraged to gain a sense of the state of the art by researching previous Lego robots. Each student team created a Web page on which it posted the results of daily experiments, enabling others-at Smith and beyond-to learn from their attempts. Most importantly, noted Weinberger, who taught the course with Streinu, the course focused on building with your hands. "Girls are rarely taught science by doing," she explained. "So often, they're afraid to touch something because they're afraid they might break it." In addition to enhancing the Summer Science offerings, "Designing Intelligent Robots" was also a scaled-down dry run for a course of the same name-Smith's first-ever full-fledged engineering course- that will be offered in the fall and spring. It will be the foundation for the new engineering major, which is expected to soon be graduating some 25 women engineers every year. For the term-time course, Streinu and Weinberger will amplify the summer syllabus with advanced programming exercises, discussions of practical and ethical issues in engineering, required writing and public-speaking assignments, and guest lectures on current issues in engineering and technology. But one thing's for sure: they'll keep the Legos, which may not be real-world but are indestructible, intergenerational-and hard to resist.

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of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts 01063. Last update: 10/18/99.

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