Encouraging Girls in STEM: workshops on analog electronics, sensors and robotics Claudina Rattaro, Isabel Briozzo, Mariana Siniscalchi, Florencia Blasina and Mariana del Castillo Facultad de Ingenier´ ıa Universidad de la Rep´ ublica Montevideo, Uruguay {crattaro, ibriozzo, msiniscalchi, fblasina, mdelcastillo}@fing.edu.uy Abstract—Female students, researchers and employees are under-represented in science, technology, engineering, and math- ematics (STEM) related fields. In many countries this has resulted in projects and initiatives aimed for promoting gender equality. To overcome the leaky pipeline phenomenon, which occurs mostly in secondary school, our University has been carrying out different actions to encourage girls to enroll in STEM careers. In this article, we focus on Taller Electrizante experience which is conducted by women teachers of the Electrical Engineering Institute of the School of Engineering. It consists of two indepen- dent modules: Laser Communication and Robotics with Arduino, where several disciplines related to Electrical Engineering and Communication Systems are presented in hands-on workshops applying the role model approach. Index Terms—women and STEM careers, role model ap- proach, robotics, telecommunications, analog electronics. I. I NTRODUCTION Women’s persistent under-representation in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, oc- cupations, and careers around the world have given rise to projects and initiatives aimed for promoting gender equality. Some representative examples are: Women’s Technology Pro- gram (WTP), MIT Women’s Initiative (MWI) (both performed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)), the “Meninas Digitais” program in Brazil, the international ini- tiative “Girl who code movement”, etc. For more information see [2]–[8] and the references therein. In our country, various actors of education, government, civil society, and the software industry, participate including Facultad de Ingenier´ ıa (School of Engineering) of Universidad de la Rep´ ublica, in the annual celebration of the International Day of Girls in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) each April 1 . This is a worldwide initiative promoted by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) to encour- age and empower girls and young women to consider studies and careers in the growing field of ICTs. For several years, Facultad de Ingenier´ ıa has celebrated this day inviting high- school students to visit research labs at Computer Science Institute (InCo) and Electrical Engineering Institute (IIE). The activities involve from poster sessions and guided tours 1 https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Digital-Inclusion/Women-and-Girls/Girls-in- ICT-Portal/Pages/Portal.aspx to hands-on workshops for groups of female high-school students. Since 2017, ninety-minute workshops were held for girls to interact with the “Buti´ a” robot 2 , experiment with analog circuits, create digital maps, play with mathematics and experiment with physics. Article [8] presents the different activities carried out by teachers and researchers at the School of Engineering to promote ICT careers among high school girls in Uruguay. In the present article, we focus on the work- shop coordinated by teachers of IIE, called Taller Electrizante experience. In the workshop several disciplines related to Electrical Engineering and Communication Systems are included. The purpose is to put the focus on areas such as electronics, robotics, programming, wireless communication and signal processing (areas linked to ICTs). The main contributions of this article are: • sharing the technical details of the proposed workshops so that they can be reproduced by other universities/in- stitutions, • sharing our experience and results working in gender- STEM topics, and • raising awareness of gender inequality in science and technology. The rest of the article is organized as follows: in Section II we summary some aspects of the methodology, in Section III we present a set of two hands-on workshops which constitute Taller Electrizante, while Section IV discusses some prelimi- nary results. Finally, Section V presents conclusions and future work. II. METHODOLOGY The activities are aimed for girls between twelve and fifteen years old, since at that stage they have not chosen the area for their undergraduate studies, yet. These areas are science and engineering, arts, biology and social sciences. All the activities are organized by female teachers and researchers, following a role model approach, as a way to showing girls the female participation in electrical engineering and computer science. In addition, female Electrical Engineer- ing students help out with the activity. Their participation is 2 https://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/ 978-1-7281-6732-9/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE