Shawnee Mission East Senior Receives Girls Living STEM Award

Ashley Eddy, a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, is one of four recipients from the Kansas City metro who received national recognition for her passion for Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM). The honorees won the Girls Living STEM Award from the National STEM Learning Ecosystem.

Eddy was nominated by Jessica Tickle, Signature Program Engineering instructor.

Eddy has mastered courses in digital electronics, civil engineering and architecture. This year she is tackling aerospace and the Project Lead The Way’s capstone engineering design and development course, all while serving as president of her school robotics team.

Eddy’s engineering projects include her award-winning “Date in History” project. She used Multisim to program components on a breadboard to display the Pearl Harbor date. She completed a fully designed school in Revit and then made a 3-D model of the school with school grounds and parameters. She included all the different materials and the cost to build the school.

The role in her STEM career that she is most proud of, is being the team captain her school's robotics team.

“Learning and teaching each year to make and complete a new robot from scratch within the parameters of the FIRST robotics competition is challenging and exhilarating,” Eddy exclaimed.

Her plans after high school are to pursue a mechanical engineer career at Kansas State University. 

“Ashley found her passion in engineering and robotics, taking every opportunity to learn and explore in high school to determine her college and career path,” Tickle shared. Tickle describes Ashley as confident and a risk-taker.

Eddy and the three other honorees were recently recognized during the Annual Workforce and Education Summit at the Kauffman Foundation by STEM Learning Ecosystems and KC STEM Alliance.

The award recognizes young women in grades K-12 who show leadership qualities, inspire others, pursue STEM through coursework and extracurriculars and who look for opportunities to build STEM skills in others in their communities. Award winners were nominated from 84 communities in the National STEM Ecosystem. There were 60 award winners nationwide.