My partner Torinae Norman and I chose a topic to make a website for YPAR. Our topic is Women in STEM, more specifically, women in biomedical enginnering. This is our adventure:

On Monday, we collaborated on building a website that brings awareness to the dearth of women in STEM-related fields, primarily biomedical engineering. At first, it was a bit tricky for us to find a specific idea we wanted to focus on, but we did know that we wanted it to be related to STEM fields. We looked at what we are interested in, Victoria: science; Torinae: art; and then we got it: biomedical engineering. It mixes both science and the creativity side of art. The great thing about our collaboration is that we work well together and get work done. So, the process of becoming a team and building on our topic was a very fluid one.

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On Tuesday, we solidified our topic for the website and read up on articles related to women in biomedical engineering. There were many articles about biomedical engineering as a field, but not about how few women are in the field. This made us even more sure of our topic, because we realized even more that there is such a deficit of women in this STEM-related field. If it was hard to find articles about women in biomedical engineering, we just thought about how hard it was for women in the field to be recognized. We started out loving our topic, but we fell more in love with it the more that we researched it.

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On Wednesday, we collaborated and edited our website. The information we had collected in our research was put onto the page and formatted in a way that many could understand. We made various sections of our page to highlight the key points of women in biomedical engineering and how it would affect a younger audience. We wanted to our website to convey the message that there are so few women in this field. We also wanted to propose possible solutions to try to fix this issue, starting with encouraging young girls to be interested in STEM. One of the challenges that we faced was writing in a way that everyone could understand. Since our topic is so “big,” it is important to translate it into simpler terms. We still have plenty to do, and are excited to see the finished product.

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Thursday, we edited our website a lot! It was kind of a long haul because we wanted to go ahead and finish as much as we could, preferably finish it. After some trial and error, we were able to get our website to a place we like for it to be. We still have a few things to do here and there, like perfecting the mobile app, but we are pretty much finished and ready to share it!

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On Friday, we added more materials on our page. These materials made our site more accessible and connected to more audiences. We aimed to connect to youth ages 10+. The additional edits also allowed our page to expand in content and in quality. Lastly, we added a call to action to get the word out about women in biomedical engineering. We wanted to add importance to the spreading of our main topic: Women in Biomedical Engineering.