Women in STEM

Now this is a little off the beaten track. As some of you know, I am an engineer. But there is a national shortage of women in engineering, as well as a whole host of other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Now this could be for a whole host of reasons, but we do need to work on encouraging more young women and girls into the subjects.

To prove that it really is somewhere they can succeed and enjoy, I am aiming to try and encourage people by making a series of videos. These will be interviews with other women in STEM subjects on what they do and to try and encourage young women and girls to try it out.

I have already uploaded a video of my own story, which is also on my youtube channel. But here is the second. It is a short video interview with my mam, Dr Shirley Atkinson. Watch the video to see what she does and what she enjoys about it. And please, share it with anyone you know, to spread the message of what women do in STEM and to encourage all other young women and girls to follow their dreams and choose whatever career they want.

Buzz Buzz - My Sonic Spanner

My love for Doctor Who is known among

my close friends. So recently when looking for something to do with my BBC Microbit, I came across a Doctor Who Challenge on the BBC website. It was a great challenge aimed at young people, but great fun for the young at heart! 

One part of the challenge is to build a sonic device, and it can be ANYTHING! Which leaves a massive margin for creativity, but being the engineer I wanted mine to also be functional, and opted for the trusty adjustable spanner (I never use adjustables unless I really have to, so it was just laying around). 

I got designing, and using a bit of cardboard left over from some packaging I made somewhere to be able to attach the bits and pieces of the sonic spanner, to the actual spanner, which I did using bluetack (for every single bit). 

For the sonic spanner, you need a battery pack, (unless you want to be tethered to a computer - not a good idea!) a buzzer and a spanner. 

My buzzer is a piezo buzzer and I did have a right old time finding out that I couldn't control it digitally, and finding out that an analogue output was only as difficult as changing "write_digital" to "write_analog". I felt like an idiot for a bit...

One of the requirements for your sonic device (as well as buzzing) is to show a picture of the TARDIS on the LEDs on the Microbit. This took a little bit of designing, mine is a simple outline of a TARDIS, that I drew by lighting up individual LEDs and defining them as an image and naming it TARDIS. But I am sure if the mood took you, you could create any image you wanted. 

As there isn't really any guidance on how to get the sonic spanner working, it really is left to you as to what language to use and how you go about doing it. If you know about the Microbit, you will know that there is a few different languages you can use, some are harder than others and require a different way of thinking. I prefer to programme in Micropython. I've included a picture of my code at the end of this post, I hope it is useful to anyone who needs it.

The end product I made I got very very excited about. After having struggled to figure out what to do with my buzzer, (and finding out the answer was simple!) I felt quite proud of it. Now to go buzz at some cupboards..!

Periodic Squares

For a long time I have wanted a patchwork quilt, I also am a sucker for science and used to have a passion for chemistry. So a little while ago I started to create a blanket.

Blanket Pieces Laid Out

For this blanket I have knitted squares, I intend to then so them together and on each square I shall sew on the correct chemical symbol. Progress on this blanket has been very very slow, but today I finished another square, which is one more on the way to the finish. But also, I realised I had no record of what squares I had knitted... I had previously written a chart of the periodic table which I had free handed, and looking back at it I had no clue what was going on and what I had done already. (Some squares were crossed out and others scribbled here and there).

Old Chart and New Chart

So I sat down and I drew out another chart, this time using squared paper and created a second chart that was neat and understandable.

Then was the task of sorting the squares into colour and seeing what bits of the blanket had been done and what was left to do.
Very satisfyingly I was neatly crossing things off the chart and there are now a nice amount of crosses in the boxes.

One of the things I failed to take into account was my eagerness to get the project started when I first settled on the idea, meaning that I have a partly completed blanket that hasn't been knitted to the same pattern. For the majority of the blanket I have been knitting the squares diagonally, in a diamond shape, this means that the square doesn't pull awkwardly in the blanket and it all lies nicely. But in the first column of my periodic table, my squares have been knitted straight and to varying sizes...
Oh well, I will see how this all looks in the end, then I may have to redo some of the start.

The pattern I've used for the square is a simple garter stitch pattern I have explained here: Square Pattern

For my squares I have used size 9 (3.75mm) and all of the wool is double knitting. Each square doesn't take much yarn to produce and one 100g ball gives quite a few squares.