Barbie has a new career, as a Robotics Engineer!
I woke up to a message from a close friend, to inform me that Barbie was now a Robotic Engineer. This message was then followed by a quote. The first words I said, on my first day whilst staring at the robotics cabinet in my universities electrical and electronic engineering department — “I love robots”. I would never live that down, but I still stand by that statement…
Barbie has accumulated over 130 careers in her 50 year lifespan, and this will now be her second career with an engineering focus. Her previous engineering career being Computer Engineer Barbie in 2010.
If you remember, Mattel received heavy backlash when Computer Engineer Barbie came out with the book “I can be a Computer Engineer”, a book that made her look like a complete idiot. “I’m only creating the design ideas,” she says. “ I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”. Barbie wears a USB stick necklace, spreads a computer virus and acts the fool.
Mattel, what were you thinking?
But they seem to have learned their lesson, this isn’t just a doll to inspire young women, Robotics Engineer Barbie comes in 4 different skin tones. As a black woman in engineering I am especially excited by the engineer they have made available, she looks like me for a change! In STEM we have a terribly low number of black women in our sector and encouraging more toy companies to develop diverse toys from STEM backgrounds may encourage more girls to consider a career in STEM instead of losing interest around 11–14 as many studies have shown us.
#representationmatters
Robotics Engineer Barbie comes with an interactive workbook created by Mattel and the Tynker.com program to teach children basic coding concepts. This is a great way to spark children’s interest in some of the branches of engineering that you would not necessarily discover at a young age.
“Our mission is to empower youth to become the makers of tomorrow through coding, and the Barbie brand is an ideal partner to help us introduce programming to a large number of kids in a fun, engaging way,” says Tynker CEO Krishna Vedati.
A common misconception in engineering is, playing with Lego as a child inspired you to become an engineer. I don’t even want to hear it, I played with my Barbie collection all the time. I had most of the dolls, cars, houses and accessories that were available during my childhood and girl, did I have an imagination! My Barbie squad got up to way too much….they had unlimited income and went on lots of adventures together.
To this day I wish I had kept them all, they’d be all cute in a cabinet and I would have a reason to buy some more, to start a serious collection. Instead, I gave them to my nephews along with all my VHS tapes and you can only imagine the carnage that followed.
Having Barbie in these roles will help more children become interested in engineering and STEM and potentially follow these careers . In the future they might say this was their inspiration for pursuing a career in STEM, they may not but at least it’s an option now, unlike many years ago where Barbie had great careers but not the STEM career for me.
On a final note, many of you will think “but do children play with dolls anymore? they’re just on their smartphones”. Well be a good role model and get children off their tech all the time. Provide a healthy balance of tech, playtime, cooking and indoor/outdoor activities outside.
We need to be the change, we have the tools to change young people’s live.
Find out more about Barbie’s Journey here, and how she became a Robotics Engineer:
What are your thoughts, send me a message/comment!
Originally published at http://iamthewomaninstem.wordpress.com on June 28, 2018.
