MILWAUKEE – Wearing a pink skirt and sequined T-shirt, 12-year-old Stephanie Peralta adjusted the wheel base on her Lego car to make it roll faster and farther.
Zaira Guerrero, 16, tucked dyed-red locks behind her ear and hung a bucket from a bridge she’d built out of pasta, testing to see if it withstood the weight.
“Now, challenge your brothers to this,” instructor Jack Samuelson told them. “Women can do anything that men can do, and, my wife would say, some things they do better.”
The students at “Engineering for Young Women,” a five-day summer academy last week at Marquette University, aren’t the stereotypical geeks, plagued by pocket protectors and weak social skills.