Machismo: girls do award-winning engineering project – 05/29/2023 – Education

Engineer woman? It is with suspicion that women are still seen in the field of civil construction, in the opinion of three girls who graduated from a technical building course and were awarded for creating self-healing concrete.

“People think like this: ‘Are we going to trust a woman to calculate a building? A woman chooses the porcelain tile, the wall color, the chandelier'”, says Lívia Colossal Rodrigues Sciascio, 18, one of the students who developed the concrete award-winning, produced with a bacterium capable of closing fissures that appear over the years.

The bioconcrete project was presented as a final course work at Etec (State Technical School) in Americana, in the interior of São Paulo. The work received four awards at Febrace (Brazilian Science and Engineering Fair), the largest exhibition of scientific work for elementary and high school students, promoted by the Polytechnic School of USP in March.

Even at the fair, when they presented the project, the Etec students faced prejudice. “Three women making concrete?” they heard from someone who attended the presentation. “Ah, guys, are we going to wake up to life?”, comments Lívia.

“No more taboo. We can be engineers, astronauts, quarries, whatever we want,” says the student, who graduated from two high school courses. In addition to buildings, which she studied from 7:30 am to 3:10 pm, she did interior design at night, from 6:50 pm to 10:00 pm. She is now taking a preparatory course and her dream is to study architecture at USP.

Another author of the bioconcrete project, Letícia Persio Miguel, 17, is studying civil engineering at the Faculdade de Americana, FAM, and works as an intern at a construction company, where she works on building projects. “It’s a very masculine environment,” she says. “But I feel valued because I’m very organized, much more so than male employees, and I like to take responsibility.”

Letícia is used to environments in which the presence of men predominates since her early teens, when she decided she wanted to be a soccer player and started training at Rio Branco, an Americana club. “I suffered a lot of bullying. They said that football was for men, they despised me”, says Letícia, who had to leave the sport after suffering a knee injury.

Maria Clara Leme Trindade, 17, also the author of the award-winning bioconcrete, works at another construction company in Americana, living, like Letícia, in an environment where men are the majority. “We women have to break taboos and occupy spaces in order to gain more respect”, says she, who is studying history at PUC in Campinas.

In the classroom of the three students at Etec, girls were already the majority, around 60% of the class, which reflects the growth in female enrollments in technical courses in which there is, historically, a male predominance.

A survey by the Centro Paula Souza, an autarchy of the SP government that administers the 224 Etecs and the 75 Fatecs (Faculties of Technology), shows how, in the last decade, the presence of girls in courses previously seen as “for boys” has grown.

In buildings, the course in which Lívia, Letícia and Maria Clara graduated last year, the total number of girls among students increased from 33% in 2012 to 45% in 2022. In agriculture, the female presence rose from 28% to 46% in the same period. The growth was even greater in the course of programming digital games: in 2012, girls were only 6% of the total and, in 2022, they increased to 29%.

The students who created the bioconcrete say that, at Etec, they no longer felt prejudice. The strangeness really came from outside, especially with the fact that they excelled in exact subjects. “Yes, I’m a woman and I master calculus”, provokes Letícia. “Yes, let’s put it in the dough by hand, let’s make concrete.”

Professor Denise Alvares Bittar, who guided the project, was moved by each award received by the girls at Febrace – the most important of which was 2nd place in the engineering category (1st place was split between two studies on pollution and water treatment). The advisor highlighted the fact that the students made an effort both in the theoretical part of the research and in putting the idea into practice in the laboratory.

In the 1st year, in the middle of 2020 of the pandemic, Lívia, Letícia and Maria Clara started thinking about the TCC, with the idea of ​​developing something linked to sustainability. They then discovered a study on bioconcrete by Dutch scientist Henk Jonkers, who uses volcanic bacteria capable of regenerating cracks.

“Developing the same concrete in Brazil would be very expensive due to the importation of this volcanic bacteria”, says Lívia. “We then started looking for a bacterium that was available in Brazil and could have a similar action.”

That’s when they arrived at Bacillus subtilis and bought it for the experience. Where? “At the Free Market”, they say, laughing. “We played there [na busca] and we found it”. In a survey carried out by Sheeta 1 kg pack was found for BRL 385, and the product description explains that it can be used in crops to reduce drought damage.

In the composition of the concrete, the bacterium is placed encapsulated with its food (calcium lactate). It survives “asleep” in buildings for up to 200 years. In the case of cracks, it comes into contact with humidity and oxygen, “awakens”, feeds itself and, during digestion, produces calcium carbonate, which “heals” the cracks.

They now intend to register the product’s patent and seek support from companies to take the idea to the market. “We’re excited about the idea that bioconcrete can have an impact on engineering,” says Letícia. “Our project is also important to encourage girls, to show that they can do what they want, in any field.”