The Girls in Control (GIC) workshop is targeted to 10-to-15-year-old girls and aims to stimulate their passion for control and encourage them to consider a career in or learn more about Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). At the moment, two different workshops have been developed and run several times:
During the basic workshop, the girls watch several videos covering control theoretic principles. They learn about feedback and discuss control examples from their every-day-life; for example, changing the temperature of the water in the shower, playing a game of chase with friends, or standing on one leg. Additionally, control techniques such as P-control and feedforward control are briefly discussed.
In the second, advanced worksop, girls dive deeper into the world of control by being challenged with a more difficult problem: an alien has crashed on earth and needs their help to control its body temperature and blood sugar level in order to stay happy and healthy. Here, more advanced control principles like integral control, event-triggered control and optimal control are touched upon.
During the bulk of the workshops the girls use Scratch, a programming language, to implement their first controllers for an automated game of their design in the first workshop. The girls are encouraged to implement advanced features such as scoring systems, adaptive dynamics, and more advanced control techniques, specially in the second workshop where they aim to find suitable control solutions to help the alien.
Female representation is an important part of the GIC workshops. We invite women working in control to speak about themselves and their careers. This provides an opportunity for the girls to interact with control engineers and see how creative, passionate and challenged they are in their line of work.
The virtual workshop ran for the first time during the 21st IFAC World Congress in 2020 in six parallel sessions, i.e., English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese. Our first workshop attracted almost 100 girls from over 20 different countries. During the workshop, all volunteers reported that there were many smiling faces and creative questions. The results produced in such a short period of time were outstanding and innovative. The feedback from participants and parents was overwhelmingly positive and many girls are looking forward to participating in repetitions of the workshop in the future. Hence, we continued to the materials to additional languages such as Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Urdu and are open to add even more languages to this list.