Once upon a time a UConn sophomore named Brianna watched her first Disney movie and fell in love, not with a prince or princess, but with a fairy named Tinker Bell.

A long time ago now, Brianna Flores ’29 (ENG), then a young girl, watched as Tinker Bell scavenged the shores of Pixie Hollow for springs and gears and other “lost things” washed up from the mainland where humans live.

Young Flores marveled at the tiny fairy in a green dress and knew she wanted to be like her.

Much later and a bit more grown, Flores garnered the courage to meet the Evil Queen before she poisoned Snow White with an apple. Scared and watching the classic film hands over her eyes, fingers spaced just so, Flores marveled at the Queen’s spellbook that set the fantasy in motion.

Today, a mechanical engineering major who’s the recipient of both an IDEA Grant from the Office of Undergraduate Research and an academic scholarship from the Krenicki Arts and Engineering Institute, Flores aims to make magic, the same kind that makes a castle sparkle.

Her IDEA project, “The Enchanted Book,” combines elements of art and engineering – and gives nod to that spellbook – to create an automated mechanism that flips pages, emits light, and offers sound, so a reader can feel like they’re in the story, not just a bystander to it.

“I wanted to make something that seemed magical in a world that sadly does not have any magic,” Flores says. “Basic engineering can do that.”

Our Heroine’s Story

Flores remembers the moment she wanted to be an engineer – inside the Epcot sphere riding Spaceship Earth, when the smell of burning wood hit her as she passed by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

The ride uses sights, sounds, and smells to tell the story of human advancements throughout history. Once she realized the experience was rooted in engineering, made by Disney Imagineers, technologists who deliver that fairytale magic, she was hooked.

In the years since, Flores has fashioned together prototypes of things in her bedroom, only last fall conceiving plans for her most ambitious project to date, “The Enchanted Book.” With the financial backing of an IDEA Grant, now there was no excuse.

“This project is allowing me to grow and see where I can go, not only as an engineer but as an artist,” she says.

Yes, Flores is a painter too, a hobby picked up when she was stuck at home and bored during the days of the pandemic. She says her bedroom at home in Vernon is chockablock with painted canvases, still lifes mostly, with a few master studies mixed in.

“Whenever I want to paint, it’s usually when I want to calm down and relax, because when I paint my brain shuts off completely. I love the calmness and serenity of that,” she says. “The inspiration I draw from is just what’s around me at the moment or what I’m feeling emotionally energized by.”

She goes on, “With both engineering and art, you have to come at them from different angles. If I’m trying to paint the ocean at nighttime, it’s not going to be a simple shade of blue. It’s going to have a bit of purple and gray. Similarly, if I’m trying to solve a statics problem, but the gravity isn’t accounted for, I have to try a different method or find a different force because it’s coming at a different angle. I’ve trained my brain to consider different approaches in both art and engineering.”

No Dragons Here

Starting her IDEA project was “super daunting,” she admits. But with a network of other students doing their own projects, she says she’s found a community at UConn to help.

This summer has been about 3D printing, configuring motors and connecting them to the electrical board, and writing code to tell a motion sensor when it’s time to turn a page. Lights and sounds will come later and sometime next year she hopes to finish.

But what story does she want to share? Rapunzel, her favorite princess? Mulan, her role model? Nope – her own.

She pitched the project using a book of her own paintings, artwork she created when she was happy, sad, confused, and angry, when she wanted to shut down after a long day, when she felt life’s hard knocks.

“Art and engineering combined are two things I really want to have in my future, and I originally thought they were too different to come together. I thought you couldn’t possibly go to an art class and paint and then go take calculus,” Flores says. “I love to see that you can do both. You can do it all.”

Flores is headed into a male-dominated field, a fact that isn’t lost on her. When she was younger, she admits to questioning whether the career path was right for her – and that’s where the main purpose of “The Enchanted Book” comes in.

“One of the things I want to do with this book is use it as an outreach tool to inspire people. In my mind, I want to inspire middle and high school girls, a time in their life when they’re getting deterred from engineering,” she says. “I want this book to show people this is something engineering can do. Yes, you can build planes and engines and that’s really cool, but you can build so much more than that.

“‘Engineering solves real problems,’ every Foundations of Engineering class starts off with that,” she continues. “Engineering makes the world a better place. It makes it a more fun place to live in. It makes it a magical place. I really want people to see that.”

And then Flores will live happily ever after.