美本STEM写作竞赛|想申请工科类专业的女孩不容错过的写作竞赛！

随着现代社会的发展，就业市场对工程学人才的需求持续走高，北美各顶尖高校的工程学院和各工程学专业热度也居高不下。申请季竞争的白热化使得学校对申请人的衡量越来越全面和细致。在过硬的成绩和科研项目之外，招生官也希望看到学生对学科既往的长期兴趣与未来的学术潜力。而在北美高等教育的系统中，学科内写作能力是一名学生的核心竞争力之一，也是学生综合素质的重要体现。在这样的背景下，申请人能否令人信服地展示自己对学科的积累、对与学科相关的社会问题的关切，以及在特定学科领域表达自己观点的能力就成为了决定申请成败的关键因素。本季推送，我们就向大家介绍一个面向全年龄段学生（小学至高中）的工程学学科写作竞赛。

Engineer girl Writing Contest

背景

Engineer girl Writing Contest 由Engineer girl网站举办。该网站由美国国家工程学会（National Academy of Engineering）管理，旨在增加公众对工程学领域内女性的关注，关注学科发展中的平等与多样性问题。

赛事详情

参赛资格：赛事分为小学组（3-5年级）、初中组（6-8年级）和高中组（9-12）三个组别。组别划分以美国公立教育系统的学制为标准。男女学生均可参赛。在美国以外的国家或地区接受教育的参赛者应依照这一标准选择相应组别参赛。

赛事日期：赛事组委会于每年的九月公布题目。截稿日期为次年2月1日。获奖者会在6月1 通过邮件收到通知。

参赛方式：线上提交稿件。

奖项设置：每个组别设一等奖、二等奖和三等奖。一等奖的奖金为$500，二等奖为$250，三等奖为$100。所有获奖文章都将在Engineer girl网站上发表。

2024年题目概览

题目：“就工程学能如何帮助实现可持续性发展的目标写一篇不超过650字的科普型文章。请从联合国给出的17个可持性发展问题的核心领域中选择一个作答”（Write an informative essay about how engineering can help humanity meet one of the Sustainable Development Goals.）

补充要求：

1.参赛的高中生需要随稿附上参考文献页。参考文献不计入文章字数。初中和小学组的参赛者可选择性提交参考文献页。

2.参赛作品必须为原创。文章正文中不应出现参赛者的任何个人信息，也不应出现对任何产品的商业推广。

打分规则

详细打分表

官方对参赛者的建议

1.花时间了解工程学科和学科从业者的工作内容。

2.在文章中加入具体、详细的示例以提高说服力。

3.为实现可持续发展目标而开发的任何技术都可能在其他领域产生溢出效应——好的或坏的。请注意在文章中加入对你提出的思路可能在社会各领域产生的影响的讨论。

4.与他人沟通特定项目的潜在风险是工程师工作中的重要内容。有时，对一个问题最可持续行的解决方案可能是终止某事而不是创造某事。你可以选择写一篇关于这样的解决方案的文章。

5.在进行研究时，请特别注意工程团队人员背景的多样性对解决现实问题的积极意义以及工程学科对解决特定群体（特别是弱势群体）关切的问题的积极作用。

2024年获奖文章

小学组金奖文章

作者：Isha Gupta (5th grade at Daves Creek Elementary School)

According to the article “Global hunger fell for decades, but it's rising again,” “Food insecurity – both moderate and severe – has “consistently increased” since 2014, when the prevalence of under-nourishment was at 8.6%. It is now at 8.9%. Between 2024 and 2024, the number of hungry people grew by 10 million people.” As this statistic shows, we are not on the right track to fulfilling our sustainable development goal for zero world hunger in 2030. However, we can use engineering solutions to achieve this goal, including hydroponics. In basic terms, hydroponics is a method created by hydroponics engineers to grow plants or crops using nutrient-rich water without using soil. A hydroponic engineer is a specialist in growing plants using water instead of soil who builds and designs hydroponic systems. In the hydroponics system, the roots of the plants get both water and nutrients from the water. Importantly, hydroponics is an engineering solution that would help reduce world hunger and sustains our resources for the future.

Historically, the Aztecs utilized the idea of hydroponic systems to feed their growing populations by creating floating gardens. After being placed in the water, the roots of the plants and crops grew through the floor of the raft, so it was provided with water and nutrients. Since then, engineers have modernized the concept of hydroponics by creating equipment to allow people to have their own hydroponic system. There are various types of hydroponics systems. The most commonly used type is a drip system in which a timer controls a small tube that drips nutrient-rich water on top of the plants, which is recycled through a pump. To maintain these hydroponic systems, hydroponic engineers collaborate with people in many other fields including mechanical engineers, plumbers, and electrical engineers. When designing a hydroponic system, the engineers must weigh the pros and cons of how the nutrient level in the water will be maintained in each design.

Hydroponics can help millions of people who go hungry daily while also considering the diverse perspectives of both the producer and the consumer. First, crops can be grown any time of year using hydroponics, producing more food than traditional farming and providing the consumer with fresh food year-round, regardless of seasonality. Secondly, in places where land is not arable, hydroponics would still allow people to grow food. Finally, hydroponics increases the growth of plants by 30% to 50% compared to regular farming. Fortunately, for consumers, this means that the nutritional value of these crops is also better than traditional farming. For all these reasons, producers can grow more food. While hydroponics has positive effects for the producer and consumer, it also has negative effects. For example, it is easier for some diseases to spread in a hydroponics system because the plants are lined up or sharing the same container. Thus, it is important to remove infected plants as soon as they are discovered.

Hydroponics is also a sustainable solution for world hunger. First, crops grown through hydroponics require much less space than those grown in soil, mainly because the plant roots do not have to expand far to obtain nutrients and water. This helps conserve our resources because we use less land for plants and crops in hydroponic systems. Secondly, studies show that a hydroponic system uses up to 98% less water than traditional farming. This conserves water. Finally, hydroponics does not require pesticides or chemicals as regular farming does. This benefits the environment in the long term.

In conclusion, hydroponics is a sustainable, engineering solution that will hopefully help us reach the goal of zero world hunger in 2030. Hydroponic systems produce more food while requiring less space and resources by using more efficient methods. Ultimately, it will help us feed the growing population by allowing us to grow food where there is not enough agricultural land or resources.

文章亮点：清晰地定义了待解决的问题和解决问题的思路，关注了技术革新中存在的风险

初中组金奖文章

作者：Chloe Weng (8th grade at Fort Settlement Middle School (Sugar Land, TX))

Made from a button and a piece of hide, traditional button whirligigs are children’s toys with a simple purpose: by pulling on the threaded string, the button spins in response. Despite its modest design, the whirligig spins at a rate of over 10,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). By expanding upon a similar concept as the whirligig, innovative bioengineers have tackled blood-borne diseases to help improve global wellness. Based on technologies that rotate rapidly, engineers have effectively enabled the diagnosis and prevention of pressing health conditions affordably in developing countries.

Among the pioneers of centrifuge-based diagnostic devices is Professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum and her team of women engineers at Rice University. Their goal was to detect anemia, a major health problem in developing countries affecting about two billion people globally. Anemia can at first be mistaken as merely fatigue and headaches, but the condition can worsen into arrhythmia and other heart problems if it remains undetected. Inspired by a simple salad spinner, the all-female team creatively upcycled materials such as yogurt containers and plastic lids to develop a durable, hand-powered device that separates blood cells from plasma using a centrifuge design. When the team tested their engineering design, they found that it successfully detected anemia in thirty blood samples in only ten minutes. Although rooting out diseases was possible before, original centrifuges such as the StatSpin were slow, powered by electricity, and cost several thousand dollars, making them inaccessible to low-resource communities. The team’s achievement proved that centrifugal force and frugal science philosophy could be combined to diagnose diseases sustainably. Due to the fact that the female engineers developed the Sally Centrifuge in a low-resource setting, it shows promise and is a clever way to reuse materials that are already being manufactured without using electrical power.

Along the same vein of developments in bioengineering, Stanford professor Manu Prakash has established a human-powered centrifuge made out of paper, called the Paperfuge, to diagnose life-threatening blood-borne diseases such as malaria and HIV. At an astonishing rate of 125,000 rpm, Prakash’s Paperfuge effectively separates the heavier blood cells from the plasma in 90 seconds, leaving any potential diseases suspended in the middle. Compared to the Sally Centrifuge, designed by Kortum’s team five years earlier, the Paperfuge tests blood samples over twenty times faster. Additionally, the hand-powered Paperfuge is economical and compact; it costs only twenty cents and features a lightweight, two-gram design. As a result, its lightweight build makes it easy to transport.

Prakash took a prototype of the Paperfuge to Madagascar in 2016, where he worked with local doctors and health care workers. The health care workers examined fifty blood samples using a fluorescent stain under a microscope to confirm the diagnoses. Prakash also works with Pivot, a nonprofit organization that collaborates with the government to build community health infrastructure. Furthermore, by incorporating relatively abundant materials such as synthetic paper and twine, the Paperfuge can be duplicated in a short amount of time with limited harm to the environment since no electrical power is required. As the engineers continue to collaborate with health care workers, as well as nonprofit organizations and local governments in needy communities like Madagascar, they work towards distributing the Paperfuge for future generations in developing countries.

Inexpensive and portable devices like the Paperfuge are powerful engineered tools for clinicians to diagnose and eliminate diseases in rural communities. HIV, malaria, anemia, and other blood-borne conditions that the devices diagnose are treatable, but can become life-threatening if diagnosed too late. Starting with the promise of the Sally Centrifuge and leading to the ongoing distribution of the Paperfuge, the efforts of engineers to develop accessible technologies to detect these conditions early are crucial to develop modern global health technology and promote the wellbeing of all people around the world.

文章亮点：切入点独特、实例翔实，关注到了研究团队背景的多样性。

高中组金奖文章

作者：Megan Haubrich (11th grade at Fred C. Beyer High School (Modesto, CA))

Dusty plains. Parched, crumbling earth. A scorching sun. This is Kenya - an East African nation that climate change and exponential population growth have left clamoring for clean water. However, a recently developed technology could finally quench Kenya’s thirst, and it's thanks to real-world magic: engineering.

Water is liquid gold in Kenya. Rain arrives unpredictably in the country’s arid lands, causing dire shortages. In a population of 54 million inhabitants, three-quarters of which reside in rural communities, nearly half of Kenyans lack reliable access to water (The World Bank Group, n.d.). These shortages impact all aspects of their lives and hinder progress to multiple of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Food insecurity rises as farmers struggle to care for crops. The necessity for many to drink contaminated water jeopardizes health, resulting in deaths from preventable diseases. Women and children remain burdened by the time-intensive responsibility of water collection, which often forces them to forsake educational and economic opportunities (Unesco, 2024).

Budding innovator Beth Koigi is intimately familiar with Kenya’s crisis, having faced the stress-inducing consequences of water insecurity while studying at Chuka University (TEDxFasoKanu, 2024). There, tap water was murky and laden with sediment - practically undrinkable. As Kenya’s water supply continued to diminish, Koigi was inspired to contemplate the nuanced relationship between climate change and water access. While attending the Global Solutions Program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley, she met like-minded thinkers including Ukrainian-Canadian environmental scientist Anastasia Kaschenko, a UN Environment’s Young Champions of the Earth finalist in 2024, and British economist Clare Sewell (UN Environment Programme, 2024).

Together, these women questioned if they could provide water for underserved communities with a universally accessible and nearly inexhaustible resource - air. “There is six times more water in the atmosphere than in all of the rivers in the world combined,” according to Kaschenko in an interview with Trent Magazine. Additionally, global climate change is only causing the amount to increase. These observations became the basis for Majik Water: a sustainable atmospheric water generation system.

In designing the product, the all-female team addressed multiple constraints. Traditional air-to-water devices utilize the process of condensation, where gaseous water molecules are slowed by their interactions with a cooled surface, forming liquid. However, maintaining this process requires large amounts of energy and equally high costs (TRENT Magazine, 2024), rendering typical atmospheric water generators inaccessible - especially for rural Kenyans.

The team turned to non-toxic drying agents, like silica gel, as an affordable, low-energy alternative. Also called desiccants, these materials absorb water from their surroundings and release it in response to heat. The team also utilized solar power to protect local ecosystems and ensure the device could be used “off the grid.”

The finished product is inclusive, promising that “if you have air, you can have drinking water” (le Cam, 2024). It uses a solar-powered fan to intake moisture-laden air, from which water vapor is absorbed by desiccants. Expelled through heat, water molecules condense as they travel down a cooled condensing coil into activated charcoal filters, resulting in ready-to-drink water stored in antimicrobial tanks (TEDxFasoKanu, 2024).

While still in its infancy, Majik Water has already had a tremendous impact. In 2024, the company partnered with The Ark Children’s Home - an organization that houses and educates Kenyan orphans from water-scarce regions - providing a device that generates 50 liters of atmosphere-derived water daily. The company is also working with several global partners from Denmark to South Africa to increase water access on a larger scale. Their efforts promise to further numerous sustainable development goals through increasing crop yields, promoting health, and empowering women and children by freeing up valuable time.

As shortages continue to threaten health and wellbeing, many Kenyans wonder if they will ever have reliable water access. However, technological innovation provides hope. Through the magic of engineering, Kenyans may finally drink in abundance.

文章亮点：对可持续性发展理念进行了深入全面的探讨，关注到了工程学学科在结局具体问题时的多种思路以及不同思路的利弊。