Girl Scouts Heart STEM

This week there was a super cool event celebrating STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Girl Scouts and the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion called "Girls Heart STEM" to review results "from a new study conducted by the Girl Scouts on girls' attitudes and awareness of careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

According to the Girl Scout Research Institute study Generation STEM: What Girls Say about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, 74 percent of girls — and even higher percentages of African-American and Hispanic girls — say they’re interested in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, math, and engineering. The trick is to break professions into their component parts. Girls who are interested in STEM want to know how things work. They like solving puzzles and problems. They want to understand the natural world."

 

From the Girl Scouts blog, here are the keys to successfully fostering and supporting girls' interests in STEM:

• Engagement: Having an orientation to the sciences and/or quantitative disciplines that includes such qualities as awareness, interest and motivation.
• Capacity: Possessing the acquired knowledge and skills needed to advance to increasingly rigorous content in the sciences and quantitative disciplines.
• Continuity: Institutional and programmatic opportunities, material resources and guidance that support advancement to increasingly rigorous content in the sciences and quantitative disciplines.

Girls also live blogged and live-Tweeted from the event - very cool!

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New Orleans Tweens Learn About Barbie's New Career: As Architect

Barbie is both nostalgic and notorious but iconic nonetheless. The icon's maker, Mattel, this week introduced Barbie's chosen profession for 2011 as an architect to a crowd of tweens in New Orleans at the American Institute of Architects annual meeting. Mattel chose this field specifically because women are under-represented in it (personally, we like that architecture is so math-based) and chose this date as it is the 125th anniversary of women being allowed to join professional associations in the architecture field. Barbie's career options are being showcased as part of the toy maker's "I Can Be..." campaign; last year Barbie was a computer engineer.

The doll and her accoutrements are, of course, available for sale ($13.99), but if you were one of the tweens in attendance at the AIA event and career workshop, you received the doll for free.

Check out the video below with the interview of two outstanding women architects as they talk about Barbie's new career and why they got involved in the campaign:




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Tweens Learning About Science, Engineering and Conservation at Girl Scouts' Eco Expo

Today we drove a gaggle of Girl Scouts down to Fort Washington Park in Maryland for the launch of the "Girl Scouts Go Green" (a year-long national partnership with the EPA for girls to learn how they can positively affect the environment). At the Park, Girl Scouts of the Nation's Capital had organized booth staffed by the USDA Forestry Service, NOAA, Boeing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others with activities designed to help tweens explore science and the environment.

A very popular station was run by the Living Classroom Foundation - here, girls constructed boats using newspaper, straws, tin foil and duct tape and tested to see how well each design could float. The trick was that the boats had to support several dozen pennies in the process. It proved far more difficult to do than it looked. A local Daisy Girl Scout named Alexandria held the day's record with 192 pennies.

Other activities included a recycling relay race, how to make a reusable grocery bag out of old t-shirts, and learning about bats in Lincoln Caverns. Several hundred girls showed up for the event despite the drizzle and overcast skies.

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Happy Pi Day!

For all you math geeks out there, today is March 14th, or 3/14, also known as Pi Day. According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, "Every year math enthusiasts everywhere celebrate pi, a celebrity among mathematical constants, on 3/14, also known as Pi Day. Extreme enthusiasts have a special celebration at 1:59 (aka, Pi Minute)."

Here is a link to the popular New York Times' article by science columnist John Tierney from 2008.

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A Chemistry Rock Music Video - Awesome for Tweens

One of our favorite bands of all time is They Might Be Giants - we rocked out to them in college and love that we can share their cool kid-tunes with our own brood today (BTW, how, how, how did we miss them when they came to the Kennedy Center last fall?!?!) . Most of their kid rock albums have been geared to younger ears, but their latest (Grammy nominated - congrats to the Johns!) album is one tweens will get a kick out of: "Here Comes Science."

Check out their music video (with super cool graphics), "Meet the Elements", here:



Perfect if your tween, like our daughters, loves science.

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An Online Science Competition by Google

Google has announced the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. Partnering with CERN, LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google wants to make young scientist the "rock stars of tomorrow."

From their website: "You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!

Entries must be in by April 4th, and semi-finalists will be announced by mid-May. Best of luck to your tween!

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Cool Book Series to Cultivate Love of Math and Science in Tween Girls

We've just learned of a great book series to encourage tween girls in maths, science and technology: Girls Know How. Each book "features a girl facing a challenge who is encouraged by a character based on a real-life role model at the pinnacle of her career." Worth checking out!

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Math is Cool, Really!

Okay, I don't know WHAT rock I've had my head under, but Ms. Twixt totally missed the boat on this one: Kiss My Math by Danica McKellar (she of "The Wonder Years" fame - a show that should've lived on FOREVER) is a new book for 'tween girls about surviving and thriving in middle-school math. Danica was on the Today show last week and had yet ANOTHER book out earlier called Math Doesn't Suck. Girls, if you haven't read these, you MUST, MUST, MUST!! It's actually a math cheat-sheet full of really good tips and tricks. Danica majored in Math at UCLA so knows what she's talking about it - all that and is an actor, too! Definitely check it out on her website