A group of 30 high school girls, split into teams, poked and prodded clay, pebbles, a sponge, duct tape, two straws, two popsicle sticks and some plastic wrap inside a small, rectangular bucket to make the sturdiest levee possible.
"I can't imagine these being very helpful with stability," said Megan Richards, who attends Dakota Ridge High School, holding up two flimsy straws.
The project was part of Girls Explore Engineering Day at the University of Colorado, which gave roughly 60 high school girls a chance to tour and explore CU's College of Engineering and Applied Science on Friday. These types of events, which happen several times a semester, are part of the college's long-term goal to attract more women and minority students to engineering.
"In our college, we want to have gender parity, so 50 percent women, 50 percent men," said Amanda Parker, the college's director of access and recruiting. "We also want a population that mimics the population of the state of Colorado for minority students, which is about 33 percent."
This year, women make up a record 28 percent of the engineering freshman class, up from 23 percent in 2012. Parker said the college as a whole is growing, too, so a 5 percent jump is significant.
More targeted recruiting efforts
Parker said the college is now specifically targeting female high school students in its recruiting efforts and has been using different words and contexts to explain engineering to them. In the spring, the college hosted a "mocktail" party for admitted students, which showed women there's more to being an engineer than the stereotypes they hear about, Parker said.
"Instead of talking just about cars and mechanics and things, we talk about how engineering is really a helping profession," Parker said. "We also stress that just because you're interested in engineering, that's not all there is about you. We don't expect you to fit into this box. You can be feminine. You can be a dancer, a climber, a mountain biker. We don't like to generalize about the women that we have."
The goal of the levee-building project was to show the high school girls that engineers work in teams and help protect communities in times of disaster, like during the Colorado flooding in September.
Attracting minority students has been more challenging for the college. This year, minority students make up 13.7 percent of the freshman engineering class, up from 13.2 percent in 2012.
Not only do engineers often make double or triple the median salary of other workers, Parker said, but the world needs all types of people to solve big challenges ahead.
"These problems are not going to be solved by one group and one gender of people," Parker said. "We need to have different life perspectives, different cultures all giving their input and working to solve these problems."
Some parents at Friday's event were surprised to learn how few women study or work in engineering fields.
Yvonne Richards, whose daughter Megan also attended the event, said she hadn't thought much about how male-dominated engineering is until she saw the numbers in front of her.
"I would've brought any of my kids," Richards said. "I have two boys, two girls. I didn't realize there was such a discrepancy between the sexes."
Learning about engineering processes
Meanwhile, teams of high school girls waited nervously to see how many cups of water their levees would hold.
Megan Robinson, Natalia Beltran Del Rio and Shannon Hessler huddled around a lab table, their levee design up for analysis.
"Your first barrier is this plastic, then the sponge, and then you've got a back-up barrier built by clay?" said Mindy Zarske, CU's director of K-12 engineering education.
The three girls all nodded in agreement.
"You didn't use all your materials, and I actually think that's great because sometimes if you can do something that's effective with less material then it's less costly, so let's try it out," Zarske said.
Robinson, Beltran Del Rio and Hessler watched, at times holding their breath, as their levee held nine cups of water before finally leaking.
Zarske, using the leak to teach the three girls about a key part of the engineering design process, sent them back to the drawing board to figure out how to make their current design even stronger.
"How could you make it even better than nine?" Zarske asked.