In a courtyard at Discovery Canyon Campus High School, senior Emily Wacker swivels back and forth on a swing that, at first glance, resembles the playground items seen in parks backyard across the country.

What makes this swing different is the series of attachments that help convert the series of attachments that help convert mechanical energy — generated by Wacker’s swinging motion — into enough electrical energy to charge Maddie Orlowsky’s cellphone.

“It makes me happy every time I see it work,” said Wacker, also a senior. “Because we built it from scratch.”

The “we” Wacker refers to is Discovery Canyon’s Women in STEM Engineering club — WISE, for short — an all-female group of aspiring young engineers that started two years ago with just four members and has grown to roughly 30. The phone-charging swing is the group’s signature project, the culmination of two years of extracurricular work.

Orlowsky and co-founder Brynn Makros started the group during their sophomore year when they noticed two disturbing things about the school’s engineering program: a startling lack of female representation and an alarmingly high attrition rate.

“Only half the female engineering students, on average, were completing the program,” Makros said. “It’s really hard to feel seen, especially as a young female student, when you’re outnumbered 10 to 1 by the males in your classroom.”

With this in mind, Makros and Orlowsky approached engineering instructor Josh Kinney with the idea of launching an all-female STEM club to provide female students with an encouraging and supportive environment.

“It sounded like a great idea,” said Kinney, who decided to sponsor the group. “But they needed a project.”

A co-worker had seen pictures of a swing that turns mechanical energy into electrical energy, and suggested that the club try to build one from scratch. Attracted by the variety of disciplines involved, the four founding members dove into the project.

“They spent the first year or so designing and planning,” Kinney said.

No one enjoys failing. But failure is essential to the learning process, particularly for engineers, who use it to revise and improve their projects. As the WISE women encountered setback after setback, they doubled down on their efforts, determined to make the swing work.

“It took a lot longer than we thought,” Kinney said. “But they worked through (the setbacks), learning to work with wood and metal, coming up with solutions for problems, and in the end it all came together.”

Watching the swing work, and remembering hundreds of hours the group spent toiling over it, never gets old, Orlowsky said.

“This is like our child,” she said. “When we started WISE, this is what we started it with. There’s so much failure involved in engineering, so seeing it actually work, and knowing that we made it work. I never get tired of it.”

Along the way, the WISE club has grown 600% in size, and more female engineering students are sticking with the program, Makros said.

“With the WISE program, we can build up our women so that when they enter the engineering field, they have a secure confidence because of the environment that they grew up in.

“I’ve had such a great time. I pitch my ideas, and sometimes they don’t work, but it’s OK. I don’t feel insecure about my failures because I have such a supportive group of women around me. I love STEM, and I love the women that I’m doing it with.”

The founding members of WISE will graduate from Discovery Canyon Campus in a few months, but the club they started, and their successful project, will stand as their legacy, they said.

“I’m so proud of this group of girls,” Orlowsky said. “They are capable of doing anything they set their minds to. We want future WISE members to realize that.”