One small idea soon became the winner of the Royal Air Force team work award in the Big Bang competition. This project is known as “Ella the Engineer” of which Ella, a young girl with big dreams of becoming an engineer attends the Big Bang Fair. There she stares in awe at the amazing experiments and projects created by scientist and engineers. However, she also experiences the discrimination that many women face in the engineering workforce –  this impacts her confidence and discourages her. After this, Ella meets her idol, a female engineer, who shows Ella her recent creation – an exploration machine which allows her to travel through various dimensions. After experimenting with the machine, she realises that she does want to be an engineer and will not let anything or anyone stand in her way.

Riju Prasai, one of three members of the idea says that the idea sparked at school, when Eltham Hill “hosted an International Women’s Day conference which we attended, participating in a workshop focusing on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics), there we learnt that women were hugely underrepresented in the industry – only 9% of the engineering workforce consists of women.” Riju also added  “These shocking figures provoked us to consider when this mindset really starts to develop, which we concluded was in childhood. Gender stereotypes associated with careers/jobs are instilled in children from a very early age – ‘boys are the ones who do engineering and mechanics, girls do teaching and nursing’. We strived to create a project that would change others views on this, in addition to motivating and inspiring young girls to follow in STEAM career paths. A book, we decided would be the most accessible for young children as well as influential.”