The IFAC LA-WICE Meeting is a one-day event that will be held during the ACCA Congress in Santiago de Chile on October 20, 2024. The meeting is open to all women who are interested in control engineering, regardless of their affiliation with IFAC.
October 2023 Call
This project will build on previous Activity Fund awards, the result of which is four portraits of influential women in control, available online. A set of additional portraits will be produced in this "Part 3" effort.
This project will support and extend a seminar series focusing on advances in the control of biological systems. An online workshop will be organized in the second half of 2024, hosted on a virtual space platform that will facilitate participant interactions, especially in poster sessions.
Three control face-to-face workshops have been conducted since 2022 in the Zululand region for 138 girls from three primary schools aged 9 to 15 years. This project will support additional workshops for girls, in Zululand and other parts of the country.
The project aims to engage a diverse range of young people in interactive learning experiences with a focus on control engineering. High-school students will have the opportunity to explore, construct, program, and operate small aerial drones in the form of a hands-on workshop. In addition, captivating drone flight demonstrations will be conducted to educate the broader public.
A series of public treasure-hunt events that utilize remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to explore specially designed underwater gyms will be held. The events are designed to be inclusive, allowing anyone to sign up and participate. Participants will take turns manually guiding an ROV equipped with a camera. The participants' performance in this task will be assessed and winners in various categories will be recognized and rewarded.
This project aims to develop children’s tridimensional ordinality. Control systems and robots will be employed to nurture such skills in primary students ranging from 6 to 11 years old. The project team consists of both psychologists and engineers, which will facilitate observation of the influence of STEM toys/experiments in dealing with mathematical anxiety. The project hopes to help children enjoy mathematics and be inspired to consider STEM careers in the future.
The project team is currently testing a mechanism that shall (ideally) promote sharing open access control education resources. The mechanism enables teachers to submit their most interesting conceptual exercises (with their solutions) for peer review in a dedicated journal, for now informally called "Control Engineering Exercises". This project will support the web hosting costs for the startup period of the journal.