Press Release
1/30/17
For Immediate Release
Trinity Hall Hosts an Engineering Workshop Designed, Led and Completed by Girls
Tinton Falls, NJ – On Thursday, January 19, 2017, Trinity Hall, an independent, all-girls high school that opened in Fall 2013, hosted a group of approximately 30 eighth grade girls for an after-school engineering workshop. The workshop, called “Make and Shake,” was an opportunity for the girls to be introduced to computer programming by building a dance video game. The event was designed and led by Trinity Hall senior Alessandra Sanfratello, who is completing her She++ fellowship through Stanford University, and included five more Trinity Hall students who served as leaders for the build teams. Once the teams built their video games they competed to see who could get the highest score. The winning team earned bragging rights and every participant left with a small prize.
“My goal through this workshop was to expose middle school girls to the world of engineering and computer science, two of my passions that developed at Trinity Hall,” said Sanfratello. “I wanted to implement the 21st century design thinking skills that we use here every day into my workshop while completing the requirements for my fellowship, as the themes we see in our engineering classes coincide with the She ++ program so well. I asked the girls what they thought engineering was to them at the beginning of the workshop and by the end of it, I think they truly got a glimpse of the design process and how these skills are applied to our world today.”
“As a fourth year engineering student, Alessandra has the computer science knowledge and empathy in her design thinking to create a workshop which challenged the girls who participated to view themselves differently, and take a leading role in discovering STEM possibilities through the activities,” said Kali Lambrou, STEM teacher.
The Make and Shake workshop used Makey Makey Invention Kits to build the video games.
Makey Makey started out as a project that was initiated by two students at MIT Media Lab and is an academic and artistic project. The Makey Makey website states: “We believe that everyone is creative, inventive, and imaginative. We believe that everyone can create the future and change the world. So we have dedicated our lives to making easy-to-use invention kits.” For more information about Makey Makey, visit www.makeymakey.com.
Trinity Hall, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3), is an independent all-girls college preparatory high school, educating and empowering young women in the Catholic tradition. Trinity Hall’s core values of leadership, respect, perseverance and faith are foundational to their mission and work as educators. For more information about Trinity Hall, visit www.trinityhallnj.org.