About 50 people gathered in the technology sandbox room in D.H. Hill Library to hear Sibel Deren Guler talk about her new invention, Teknikio. There, Guler explained her inspirations and what her invention does.
Teknikio is a set of toolkits that helps children apply electronics to anything they may find interesting. Teknikio aims to not be gender biased.
Guler made Teknikio because she thought traditional toolsets made for kids are biased with respect to gender, ignoring gender-neutrality.
“What I really decided I wanted to do was to inspire people to build their own toolboxes,” Guler said. “When I look at my desk in my studio or in grad-school, it’s covered with all of these different materials. And I think that’s what’s so interesting about the stuff we make, it’s all tied back to our experiences and the different materials we might have worked with before.”
Guler began thinking about Teknikio when she went into the toys section of a couple different stores. She noticed that toolkits and games in which kids put things together seemed more advanced in the boys’ section.
Guler also noticed that the gendered toys seem to play a role in the career choices girls make later in life. Only 28 percent of engineering workers are women, according to a graph Guler presented, and many of those women don’t stay in their jobs more than 10 years after graduating.
After finishing Teknikio, Guler held workshops to test the product and allowed students to sign up to try out the toolkit. Initially, her toolkit was only helping girls, but Guler wanted Teknikio to be equally targeted to all children.
“I noticed when I was doing workshops at museums that there was this social issue, so if I was doing a sewing workshop and there were four girls already there, a little boy might be interested, but he might not sit down because he thinks it’s a girl thing,” Guler said.
Events like this helped Guler learn that some areas seem to be more girl-centric or boy-centric, so she pulled back a little on being completely gender neutral. Nonetheless, she wanted to make her toolkits accessible to both genders without discriminating.
“I didn’t want to impose this feeling of [Teknikio] being girls-only, I just wanted it to be accessible and inviting to girls as well,” Guler said.
Rosalynn Phan, a first-year student studying biochemistry, attended Guler’s event to hear about her new invention and the gender issues within the engineering and science education fields.
“When I grew up, I was handed an electronics kit, and it didn’t have a little boy or a little girl on the cover, and I’m not sure that affected me personally,” Phan said. “But I do know that I loved that kit, and it was something that I owned, not something I would have to borrow from my guy friends.”
Teknikio is mainly sold to educators and museums in order to help them teach younger kids with gender-neutral tools. However, the product is not sold in many toy stores because that would require Guler to take materials out of the kit in order to meet safety requirements.
Guler hopes to continue expanding her gender neutral toolkit by adding new materials for kids to use.
