Workshops

Greenlight for Girls - 2016

Being a woman and pursuing an engineering degree in college, I was approached by an organizer for a Greenlight for Girls event held at the Boys and Girls Club in Richmond, California in August 2016. This program was designed for young girls living in underprivileged households to expose them to the world of STEM.

Given my experience with designing and constructing a boat, I, along with my twin, created a 1-hour interactive hands-on workshop for the participants.

In this session we taught the girls some basics of what they need to keep in mind when designing a boat i.e. weight, buoyancy, surface area etc. and then gave the girls tools to make a cardboard version of my boat design themselves.

At the end of the day-long workshop, after all 100 girls had gone through our session, we tested the cardboard pontoon boats in water to see how good their construction skills were. Every single boat floated and the young girls were beyond thrilled.

CaSGC: Engineering & Space - 2018

When I was President of TritonCubed, the California Space Grant Consortium reached out to me to prepare a 1-day workshop for 100 incoming freshmen of Jacob’s School of Engineering to showcase UCSD’s space organizations.

For this workshop we put together a presentation on Long Duration Balloons (LBD). An LDB mission carries payloads with various sensors and travels between continents or around the world for one circumnavigation. These flights may last up to three weeks and satellite-based electronic systems are utilized to transmit data.

After introducing the students to the world of scientific ballooning and CubeSats, we made them participate in a hands-on demonstration. We got two small payloads equipped with solar panels and a GPS tracking system and had student volunteers carefully prepare each balloon, fill it with helium, attach the delicate payload, and finally launch it.

I used habhub.org and windy.com to monitor the direction of the wind, and we used the APRS radio communication system to track the balloons as they made their way across the state.

Students were able to track the balloons on their phones long after the launch and see the journey each one took. One popped half an hour after being launched and landed 50 miles north of San Diego but the other made it all the way to Arizona.