The Women in Engineering and IT team gathered approximately 40 volunteers together last week to be trained to support two of our high school outreach programs – the SWIEIT Speakers’ Program and Collabor8.
We started off the day with female engineering and IT students preparing to be SWIEIT Speakers. Two lovely experienced speakers, Katelyn Bywaters and Micaela Yaconi, gave examples of amazing SWIEIT speaks as well as some tips for confidence, managing nerves and public speaking. Everyone then had a chance to work on their own speeches.
At 12pm the guys arrived, as did the food! Volunteers got a chance to network and meet other volunteers before we started up again.
The second session for the day focused on our hands on activities. We discussed the best way to engage with high school students and manage the occasional unruly student. We also ran through two of our key activities. Arcel Sebastian ran the IT activity Live Lights, Smooth Sound, Cool Code. She explained how to run the activity and some of the problems that volunteers may encounter. Katelyn then ran through Floating Houses, one of the most popular engineering activities. Our volunteers had fun making their own floating houses!
We also ran a brainstorming session for students interested in being involved with forming some new hands on activities. Some great ideas came out it!
A huge thank you to all of the students who donated their time to be trained. We wouldn’t be able to run our programs without your amazing, enthusiastic support.
