The team at building set toy company Click-A-Brick have praised a Canadian mother’s ingenuity for inspiring her daughter’s interest in engineering while simultaneously providing a female role model in the field of engineering for all young children.
Dinah Davis, in a blog post for the Medium blog network The Lighthouse, outlined how her seven-year-old daughter received a letter from Santa Claus informing the girl that Mrs. Claus wanted to pass along a greeting, but she was busy in the workshop fixing the toy-making machine. Furthermore, the letter revealed that Mrs. Claus has a degree in engineering from the North Pole University.
Davis, founder of Code Like a Girl and currently a Director of Research and Development, said in the blog post that she wanted her daughter to have a role model in engineering, which is why she arranged the letter for her, specifically with the revelations about Mrs. Claus’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related career.
“Her dream is to become a toy maker when she is older,” Davis wrote in her post. “She was excited to hear that Mrs. Claus was an engineer. When she was heading to bed she said that when she is older she was going to write Santa and ask him for a job as a toy engineer at the North Pole. This letter got her excited about becoming an engineer. It is exactly this type of thing that more girls need to see and hear often when they are growing up. They need role models. They need to see that STEM jobs are the kinds of jobs they can do.”
The post and the revelations in the letter have garnered media attention, with CBC radio and the Siliconrepublic website reporting on Mrs. Claus’ newly-revealed job descriptions and even having the ‘Chief Postal Elf’ from Canada Post further revealing that Mrs. Claus’ full job title is Chief Electronic Imagination Consultant and her job is to design the electronic games and toys, supervise the building of them and advising her elf team on how to make electronic games and toys more fun and exciting.
All the newfound attention for Mrs. Claus and the revelations about her engineering background are a great way to give most girls a role model at young ages, Co-Founders of building set toy company Click-A-Brick Jason Smith and Georg de Gorostiza say.
“The letter from Santa was a brilliant little stroke of genius,” Smith said. “She’s a character who gets relatively little attention and she is totally open to interpretation, so why not do something constructive with it and create a role model in the STEM fields for the youngest of children to look up to. It’s such a simple thing to do, but if this backstory really takes off, it could help sculpt a whole new history for Christmas to draw on. Maybe in 10 years or so, we’ll be watching classic Christmas cartoons that showcase Mrs. Claus’ engineering at work instead of just showing her baking cookies for the elves.”