74
February 2017
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
T
eaming
ASPRS
with
AAUW
Encouraged to join the AAUW as an undergraduate math
student by three math professors, Dr. Renee Fister, Dr.
Maeve McCarthy, and Dr. Darla Kremer, Dr. Melissa Rura
has been a member of AAUW for many years. She fondly
remembers her first AAUW sponsored activity, a trip to
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with these professors
in the late 90’s and her first exposure to the National Lab
system. As a young woman being guided into an academic
path she was both inspired and dismayed to hear and see the
“barriers for women and girls” in math, science, engineering
and technology from both the men working at the lab and
women who had brought her to participate in the program. In
part, as a consequence of this experience, she has continued
to work on problems that relate to overcoming barriers and
within organizations that make that work a priority.
Incoming ASPRS President Becky Morton is an active AAUW
member and particularly values the ability to work toward
empowering young women within both organizations. Ms.
Morton has been active in the Oakland-Piedmont Branch of
AAUW since 2009. The Oakland-Piedmont AAUW Branch has
a strong program of advocacy for women and girls in the local
community and a STEM camp program for middle school girls
called Tech Trek, is a shining example. The Tech Trek STEM
program is designed to immerse and empower young women to
address the question “Why so few women in STEM?” The City
of Oakland in California has, in the recent past, had a national
reputation for inner-city violence, racial tension, and poverty,
see “Community Policing and Crime: The Process and Impact
of Problem-Solving in Oakland” 2008
1
. Although improving in
these areas, the fact remains that particularly young women
in Oakland experience a stressful and sometimes dangerous
school environment which often fails to nurture their drive
toward learning and achievement. The young women selected
for Tech Trek are selected by their teachers because they have
tremendous potential and the pool of candidates is always
many times larger than the available scholarships. This year
(2016) the Oakland-Piedmont Branch sent twelve young
women from the Oakland school district to Sonoma State
University on a full scholarship for a week-long hands-on
STEM learning experience.
As part of an initiative of outreach to the ASPRS community to
encourage diverse populations of practitioners, professionals
and researchers, the sitting ASPRS Student Advisory Council
Chair, AmandaD. Aragón, participated in theAAUWsponsored
Tech Trek to incorporate a geospatial training component.
Ms. Aragón was particularly proud of her participation in the
program and she describes her experiences below.
P
ixel
M
atrix
– A S
ummer
C
amp
P
roject
Amanda Aragón led a hands-on geospatial science learning
experience, where sixty girls from the state of New Mexico
were interviewed and selected for the week-long learning
accelerated experience on the campus of NewMexico Institute
of Technology in Socorro, New Mexico. In addition to robotics,
computer science, biology and other areas of research, they
participated in the “Pixel Matrix,” an interactive, youth,
group learning activity to promote understanding and
cognitive skills by integrating remote sensing and geography
skills with a hands-on learning experience.
Figure 1. Building a map of pixels. Students were given 1-inch x 1-inch cut out colored paper “pixels” and asked to recreate the world pixel by pixel
on the grid they created.
