Girls Run the Show in the Community Tool School for Girls at STEAM Studio

Any day at UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio is likely to be noisy, and the last day of Community Tool School: Shop Class for Girls Guitar Camp is no exception. There’s banging, drilling, grinding, and on top of it all the single sustained notes of brand-new electric guitars being tuned. Off the main shop floor two girls have removed their safety glasses and are working on the finishing touches of their new guitars—which they designed, crafted, and built themselves.

“Most people had a theme to their guitar,” explains Jade Smith, a sixth grader at Reynolds Middle School, whose bright red guitar is shaped like a swooping heart. “My theme was Cupid, but with a twist…I don’t make hearts, I break hearts.”

Eighth grader Harper Levinger, who goes to Franklin Middle School and is wearing a NASA t-shirt, painted her guitar with planets and stars. “I want to do aerospace engineering,” says Levinger, who also attended the Community Tool School afterschool program during the academic year. “I’m an engineer…well, I’m not, but I want to be. You can basically build anything with engineering.”

Levinger and Smith are a step closer to realizing their dreams of becoming engineers after a week at STEAM Studio. The process of creating and building their own electric guitars gave them a chance to not only explore their artistic skills, but to use new software and tools they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

“You sketch out your guitar on cardboard, and then we put it in a scanner and it scans to a computer,” Smith says, “and we use a 3D building app which brings our guitars in to 3D modeling, and then we print it on the wood to the width and the height, and then the CNC router cuts it, and then you do a lot of sanding. And I mean a lot a lot.”

Under the guidance of STEAM Studio Director Sara Sanders and Outreach Coordinator Jeannie Regan, the girls also used a water jet to cut the metal of the pick guard, a bandsaw, a hacksaw, a drill press, a soldering iron, and a laser cutter. They’re excited for the opportunity to work with the tools STEAM Studio has to offer, and to be in the shop learning with other girls.

“Girls don’t get as many opportunities for camps for engineering,” Levinger says. “It’s a male-dominant field. And it shouldn’t be.”

“We have girls who are boyish-types, tom-boys, and we have girly-girls, and we have some in the middle,” Smith explains. “And it’s equal here. Everybody here is amazing at what we all do.”

“It is important that girls have opportunities to immerse themselves in design processes, and to build and make things in a supportive environment. These opportunities can lead to a deeper understanding of themselves and their capabilities, and encourage further STEAM education and careers,” said Regan. “Girls at this age, at really any age—it seems that every woman we meet at pick-up time wants to participate as well—historically have been barred and dissuaded from these sorts of spaces, and we seek to redress that imbalance. By encouraging middle and high school girls to come to STEAM Studio for either the afterschool program or our summer camps we hope that they will gain valuable experience and skills and learn to see their world in new ways.”

STEAM Studio saw 29 campers over the course of three camps this summer, which were funded by grants from the Community Foundation of WNC, the Windgate Foundation, and UNC Asheville. The campers built everything from wind chimes and bird houses to cutting boards and benches. Each of the girls, who Regan described as “confident, curious, and motived to each other’s success,” got to take home functional and beautiful objects that they made themselves, Regan said, all while learning new workshop skills and more about the engineering process.

Part of the engineering process, Smith and Levinger learned, is breaking things.

“There were a lot of mishaps while making these guitars,” says Smith, who had the metal rod inside her guitar neck break at one point and then stripped a few screws trying to fix it.

“My guitar neck broke so I had to glue it back together,” Levinger adds.

The set-backs were frustrating, the girls agreed, but it didn’t stop them.

“According to amazing Sara, she said that mistakes are good, failure is amazing, if you’re not failing you’re not learning, and in this case, you definitely need to learn,” Smith says.

They also learned to overcome some of their fears and uncertainty around some of the equipment, especially the bandsaw. “Using the bandsaw, when I heard the thing move, I was like, I can’t do it!” says Smith, who explains it was her first time ever using a bandsaw.

“That was my first time, too,” Harper agrees. “I was really scared I was going to cut my fingers off.”

At the end of the day, though, the girls both learned how to use the equipment and kept all their digits intact. It was an experience they say they both recommend to other girls.

“Definitely try this,” Levinger says. “If you’re even remotely interested in engineering or guitars, you should definitely do it. It’s really fun.”

“This is amazing,” Smith says. “This is probably the best summer I’ve had in a long time. It’s because there’s all these awesome people, and all these girls here who enjoy doing what we’re doing now. And it was something to help me figure out what I want to do when I’m older. It was just an amazing experience that I’m going to remember, and one day, hopefully, I will be working here at the UNC Asheville STEAM Studio.”

For more information about STEAM Studio and Community Tool School: Shop Class for Girls, visit steamstudio.unca.edu. For more information about summer camps at UNC Asheville, visit www.unca.edu/events-and-news/stories/unc-asheville-summer-camps-2019.