Bosch STEM event featured Legos for learning

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More than 30 ninth grade girls formed teams and played with Legos Wednesday, but it wasn’t during recess or free time. They were participating in an interactive STEM event at Bosch Anderson.

The event, now in its third year, is designed to introduce girls to STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The Legos exercise served as an assembly line. Students took on roles that included quality control, customer service and production. Each student with Legos had a function to perform before passing the product to the next person. The process was timed and after each round the students were given an opportunity to provide feedback on how to make the process more efficient.

A career in manufacturing may not be a path many young women have considered, which is why Bosch wanted to showcase how STEM relates to manufacturing today and into the future.

“The fact that manufacturing has advanced so much in the past several years, it is a little bit easier to recruit females into this environment versus the old stigma of the dirty manufacturing areas,” said Randy Bunch, HR director of Bosch Anderson. “I think a STEM field is a wonderful opportunity for any young person. The opportunities are almost endless.

“And especially from a female standpoint, we want to recruit them because of the diversity of thought. They can add insight and innovative thoughts that we don’t have otherwise.”

Seventy Bosch associates, many of them women, volunteered to work with students during the event.

“This is a great thing because STEM is the lifeblood of Anderson and we are a technical organization,” Bunch said. “Bosch was founded on very strong technical principles. STEM is the lifeblood of our workforce here and it allows us to do the innovative and cool things we do here.”