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We had three amazing college students work with us to deliver the Girls in Science Camp at Green Street and serve as role models for the campers. This year, those young women were Stacy Uchendu, Anna Redgrave, and Mikaela Carty. In this five-part series, they share their experiences and favorite moments of the week.

Girls in Science Camp Reflection – “What I Learned”

by Anna Redgrave

Not everyone becomes a scientist, but having a scientific mind is a surprisingly common human quality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a Calvin and Hobbes comic, the pair come across a snake in the woods and decide to learn everything they can about snakes. Calvin suddenly realizes it is summer vacation and declares he can’t allow himself to learn anything, but Hobbes assures him “if nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun.”

Over the course of the camp, I got to witness this sort of a moment again and again as girls realized that they could put their own ideas into the work we were doing. They went from exclaiming how flies looked gross under a microscope to asking me if they could dissect them. One girl discovered the trick to breaking the surface tension in soap bubbles and proceeded to fill the room with bubbles with machine-like efficiency. The things we figure out for ourselves are what we are most proud of and most likely to remember.

It’s important to realize that science isn’t creating this mindset of investigation and discovery, it’s fostering it.

Every one of the campers came to camp having already actively participated in the scientific method, they just might not have known it. I’m so happy that I got to see so many people (staff included!) learn under the guise of having fun, and have fun under the guise of learning.

 

We had three amazing college students work with us to deliver the Girls in Science Camp at Green Street and serve as role models for the campers. This year, those young women were Stacy Uchendu, Anna Redgrave, and Mikaela Carty. In this five-part series, they share their experiences and favorite moments of the week.

Girls in Science Camp Reflection Series – “No Limits”

by Stacy Uchendu

I really didn’t know much about Girls in Science Camp except that it was for 4th to 6th grade girls and its goal was to encourage girls to be interested in STEM fields. I didn’t know the extent of how much these girls would be learning about biology, chemistry, and physics and I especially did not expect the girls to actually grasp and enjoy the advanced concepts they were being taught. They learned about DNA, mutations, cell structure, light/waves, etc. – material I myself did not learn about until high school.

This experience made me realize that there is absolutely no limit to what a child can learn; if you are a willing teacher, there are many intelligent, future scientists eager to learn.

 We had three amazing college students work with us to deliver the Girls in Science Camp at Green Street and serve as role models for the campers. This year, those young women were Stacy Uchendu, Anna Redgrave, and Mikaela Carty. In this five-part series, they share their experiences and favorite moments of the week.

Girls in Science Camp Reflection – “Before and After”

by Mikaela Carty

When Professor Othon, my advisor, offered me a job working with Girls In Science Camp, I got super excited. Well excited and a little hesitant. I was very honored that she asked but I was a little reluctant to accept Professor Othon’s offer because although I had taken two semesters of challenging physics, I did not fully feel equipped to lead experiments and lessons in this (physics) or any of the other subjects (being biology and chemistry). Professor Othon assured me that I would be right for the job and after consulting my mother I changed my departing ticket to a later date so that I could stay long enough to assist in the science camp.

I imagined that the girls would be young and anxious to learn about science. I imagined that they would draw male scientists when we asked them to do the “Draw a Scientist” assignment the first day. I imagined that they would forget to write in their journals and I and the other helpers would have to remind them to do so. I imagined my experience would be similar to dealing with myself when I was that age. I pictured shy, energetic, bright and inexperienced little girls.

However, what I imagined was different from the reality of my experience. For one, the girls were a lot more knowledgeable than I had expected. When they were asked to draw a scientist (at the start of the week) many of them drew females holding scientific paraphernalia rather than males. Without help from the professors, they were the ones who realized that if you place a lot of cherries on a scale then the scale would display a measurement and you could then divide that value by the number of cherries to calculate the weight of an individual cherry. I cannot believe that they knew that this was a method to try when your object is too light for a scale.

They are such bright children and their notes were wonderful. There was one girl that wrote notes that were so thorough I felt like she was already ready for college! I was very impressed with the students that participated in this camp. I believe that this is a sign that we are well on our way to a world where girls are just as prevalent as guys in the scientific fields.

It’s wonderful to see females being researchers and professors and mothers and knowing that we have the potential to be anything we set our hearts on. I am so grateful to have been part of this wonderful camp and I hope to continue and help propel the women in science movement.

We had three amazing college students work with us to deliver the Girls in Science Camp at Green Street and serve as role models for the campers. This year, those young women were Stacy Uchendu, Anna Redgrave, and Mikaela Carty. In this five-part series, they share their experiences and favorite moments of the week.

Girls in Science Camp Reflection Series – “Draw a Scientist Revelation”

by Stacy Uchendu

A really cool moment in the Girls in Science Camp is the revelation of how drastically the girls’ perceptions of scientists change from the beginning to the end of the week. At the beginning of the week, the girls were asked to draw a picture of a scientist and many of them drew “mad scientist” with hair standing on end, long lab coats and bright colored potions. By the end of the week, they were asked to draw a scientist again and this time all of the girls drew women in traditional lab settings, at home, with pets and children, doing their favorite hobbies, etc.

Their pictures showed how their perception of a scientist expanded from the male, mad scientist and diversified into intelligent, multi-faceted women with many interests and real lives. Their realization came as a result of interacting with a diverse range of women scientists and learning about their lives in and outside of lab, and I believe this change in perception will allow these girls to imagine themselves as future scientists as well.

We had three amazing college students work with us to deliver the Girls in Science Camp at Green Street and serve as role models for the campers. This year, those young women were Stacy Uchendu, Anna Redgrave, and Mikaela Carty. In this five-part series, they share their experiences and favorite moments of the week.

Girls in Science Camp Reflection – “Why I Wanted to Be a Part of the Camp”

by Anna Redgrave

I’m a fairly stubborn person. When someone tells me I should like something, it tends to make me more resistant to liking it. It isn’t until much later, sometimes years later, when I’m working hands-on with that same subject and coming up with all my own ideas about it that I think “hey, they were right!”

This has been my experience with education in general, but more specifically with science. Science was presented to me early in school as a subject that I should like. I got to formulate all my own questions and do my own experiments. The only trouble was that the questions and experiments we worked with in school were all given to us. There was no room to really think about anything, it was all just following directions and recording observations.

When I heard about the Girls in Science Camp I was thrilled because to me it represented a space outside of the often overwhelming school-in-session environment where girls could really delve into issues and ask their own questions. That kind of opportunity is something I could really have used as a kid, and I was excited to have a chance to help other girls develop an appreciation for science.