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Engineer Girl
Pros: Content ranges from day-in-the-life profiles to Q&A pages, and girls can submit questions to a diverse collection of female engineers.
Cons: Interaction is limited to the ability to post questions.
Bottom Line: Empowering tool encourages girls to explore engineering but is mostly static and best-suited for choosing courses and looking at colleges.
As a static site, Engineer Girl is primarily useful for investigating engineering careers. However, teachers and career counselors can certainly use it to help interested girls explore the possibilities.
Through a visually appealing format, Engineer Girl gives girls information on the full range of engineering careers. The site is divided into three sections: Engineers, What They Do, and How To Get There. The first section, which is the bulk of the site, is dedicated to profiles of actual female engineers, with sections such as A Day in the Life and Ask an Engineer. It includes a place for registered users to ask questions of the engineers who also have registered on the site. The second section goes into more detail about the types of real-world problems engineers are currently solving. The final section focuses on what girls can do right now to get on track to become engineers. The site provides lists of clubs and competitions -- including the Engineer Girl Essay Contest -- that develop and encourage engineering-related skills. Every page also has tools for printing or emailing content and for sharing on social media sites.
The site does a great job of covering content from a variety of perspectives, and it includes information on the coursework needed to work in different engineering fields as well as the types of work that engineers do. The information about engineering careers is extensive and appears to be current. Girls can ask questions of adult women engineers, who themselves can register on the site as experts.
The only weakness is the relative scarcity of interactive materials. There are links to activities and quizzes on other sites, but there's no built-in functionality here except the ability to ask questions.
Learning Rating
A good source of information
The website has an abundance of links to information in all sorts of engineering fields and what sorts of paths girls can take to reach their goals. There's a nice variety of occupations considered, and a good emphasis on current and past role models in different fields. The website also allows students to get in touch with women already in the industry, so you can get authentic answers, though it might take a while to respond.
The website itself seems to be old and rough in some aspects. Some of the buttons simply do not work anymore, and the font/design choice can be hard to read/navigate. It is also not updated too frequently from what I could tell, with months or years between some posts. There navigation is also very complicated, with an abundance of pages. While this is good in terms of content, it can be hard for younger students to navigate.