Monday, February 23rd, 2015
Area event exposes girls to STEM concepts
By David Giesige
Photo by David Giesige/The Daily Standard
Girl Scouts Amna Souai, from left, Jorja Anderson, and Sierra Henning complete a packaging engineer exercise at Wright State University-Lake Campus. Saturday, 23 Girl Scouts participated in Girls Go STEM! - a program intended to show girls the fun problem-solving opportunities available in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
CELINA - Twenty-three Girl Scouts braved Saturday morning's winter weather to learn about opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math at Wright State University-Lake Campus' first Girls Go STEM! event.
The event gave the the girls a hands-on learning experience exploring a day in the life of a scientist, technician, engineer or mathematician.
Several stations were set up around James F. Dicke Hall, with activities ranging from blowing bubbles to building cardboard cars. The program showed the girls career opportunities in math and science, said Megan Ramey, program and partnerships manager of the Girl Scouts of Western Ohio .
The girls were fully engrossed with the experiments. They had only a brief time to tell the newspaper how entertaining, challenging and interesting they found the program to be before they dove back into their lab reports and data charts.
The girls particularly liked building cardboard cars. They crowded the table, eagerly awaiting their turn to construct a vehicle from the sheets of cardboard and stacks of toy car parts laid out before them.
Side-by-side ramps stood next to the building table and the girls competed among themselves to see who could build the fastest car and the car that could travel the farthest.
"They really seemed to love (the cardboard) cars," Dr. Rachmadian Wulandana of the mechanical engineering department said. He said the exercise was meant to help the girls gain experience through trial and error and to help them find the best combination of variables.
That level of enthusiasm for a science experiment was something coordinators were happy to see.
"This event is important because it helps young girls have positive experiences with STEM careers. They work as a team and use a lot of problem-solving. This shows them that being an engineer or a scientist isn't all about sitting alone in a lab," Ramey said.
STEM careers are typically dominated by men but Ramey hopes the girls who attended will find a passion for math and science that continues through college and into their careers.
Dr. Diane Huelskamp of the education department, Dennis Hance of the mechanical engineering department and Wulandana coordinated the event.
