Spring / Printemps 2017 21 WISE Kid-Netic Energy Workshops By Nusraat Masood WISE Kid-Netic Energy is an outreach pro- gram established in 1990 at the University of Manitoba and a member of Actua. We serve all of Manitoba, including First Nations reserves, northern communities, southern communities and the city of Winnipeg. Annually we engage between 25,000 to 35,000 youth depending on funding levels. We are a not-for-profit. Whether it is summer camps, workshops, girls clubs or spe- cial events, all of our activities support STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) learn- ing through fun, messy, experiential activities. WISEstandsforWomeninScience&Engineering. We engage all youth but have specific initia- tives to target underrepresented groups like girls, Indigenous youth and youth facing socio- economic challenges. We hire undergraduate students pursuing degrees in STEM to deliver ouroutreach.Thisyearweareofferingover20 workshops for in-classroom exploration. We follow the Manitoba science curriculum and are an excellent resource for teachers. In fact this year we received a STAM (Science Teachers’ Association of Manitoba) award. We have a workshop for grades 4-8 want- ing a great first exposure to coding. The workshops is called “Codemakers” which is a nod to our funder Google. We bring tablets and Dash robots and go through simple coding concepts like if/ else and loops. Another great workshop for grade 9 is our “Solder Shop” where students solder electrical components on a printed circuit board to build a blinking LED device. For all of our workshops we bring in trained staff, materials and clean up afterwards. If you’re looking for extra-curricular activ- ities for your girls we have some great options. This year we are running our “All Girls Robot Fight Club.” It’s an eight -week, 4-hour long training prep series for the Manitoba Robot Games LEGO Mindstorms competition. All participants use our LEGO Mindstorms to prepare and compete. We have a Computer Science student, Valorie Plataro, an UMSATS member and ECE student Jenica Woitowicz training the girls this year. This summer we will also be offering an all-girls intro to coding camp. The dates are July 18-20 and August 1-3. The girls will be exposed to learning apparatus like littleBits, Arduino, Dash, LEGO Mindstorms and Snap Circuits. If you would like to learn more please see our website: wisekidneticenergy.ca Nusraat Masood is the Program Administrator for WISE Kid-Netic Energy. She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Manitoba (UofM) in Electrical and Computer Engineering. For her Masters she designed and fabricated a lab-on-a-chip device that non-invasively manipulated dielectric beads using dielectrophoresis. After her graduate degree she worked at a start-up in Kanata, Ontario. For the past five years she has led the STEM outreach not-for-profit WISE Kid-Netic Energy program for the Faculty of Engineering at UofM. She recently spoke about how all youth are capable of pursuing STEM careers in a TEDx talk. Ms. Masood is the interim Director of UofM’s Internationally-Educated Engineers Qualification program.