Program teaches girls engineering via apparel design

To understand the properties of non-Newtonian fluids, 20 middle-school-aged girls walk on a mixture of water and cornstarch outside Cornell's Human Ecology Building July 29. On a late July afternoon, 24 middle school girls took turns walking on water outside Cornell's Human Ecology Building. The girls, from cities and small towns in upstate New York, pranced atop a goopy mixture of water and cornstarch, careful not to stop or it would grab them like quicksand. Their lesson was to learn about the properties of shear-thickening fluids - substances that morph between liquid and solid states and are used in some high-end body armors and protective gear. The demonstration was one of dozens of lessons in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) principles that the girls received as part of Smart Clothing, Smart Girls: Engineering via Apparel Design, a weeklong course designed and hosted by faculty, staff and students in Cornell's Department of Fiber Science & Apparel Design (FSAD) with collaborators at the University of Minnesota. (Lucy Dunne '02, M.A. '04, associate professor of apparel design, led the Minnesota team. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the program is intended to attract young girls to STEM careers, which continue to be filled predominantly by men.