Circuit Girls: A STEM Focused Club for Young Women
My students need 17 Chibitronics Sketchbooks (starter kits), 5 Circuit Scribe Maker kits, and 8 Cubelets which are cube robots that can build different projects.
Why aren't more girls growing up to be scientists or engineers? My girls are interested in STEM, but turn away from Maker activities when they see all of the boys involved. We want to encourage our girls to pursue STEM careers whilst changing the girls' views about the way the world perceives them.
We have a diversified multicultural group of students who are very interested in STEM activities.
However, when our girls attend a class focused on STEM, it is dominated by boys. This intimidates the girls so they sometimes choose not to participate. Our girls are like most preteen and early teen girls and are struggling to both find themselves and fit in. They want to stand out enough that they are not invisible but blend in enough that they do not stick out. They are curious and willing to try and push their boundaries, but they still feel great peer pressure and may not try things in environments where the feel threatened or might be perceived as uncool. Our school encourages new technologies and we have maker ed programming in place, but this is predominantly attended by boys. Our girls are very interested in participating, but seem to shy away from this group when they see how many boys are involved. They are keen to learn more about STEM, and this club will fill that need.
My Project
This funding will help me create a "Circuit Girls" club focused on learning more about circuits and electronics. The girls will experiment with electronic authoring by creating digital stories with Scratch and then creating interactive notebooks with the Chibitronics Notebooks. These notebooks will teach the girls how to build series circuits, parallel circuits, and more, all while crafting with electricity. The guided directions and templates will make creating paper circuits a breeze! They'll even be able to program the LED stickers. Then we'll move on to drawing circuits with the Circuit Scribe Maker kits and playing with Cubelets to learn more about how circuits parallel with robotics. Eventually we will move on to more complicated projects like Arduino and Hummingbird Robotics that I thankfully had donated from our PTA! By combining the low tech journaling with high tech robotics, these girls will be well on their way to a career in science, technology, art, or engineering.
Help our girls become the next innovative inventor with these crafty circuit kits and instill creative confidence in our young women by allowing them to draw and play!
These low cost kits make creating circuits as easy as doodling and will give the girls the power to create. As Electroninks adds, "Take circuits out of the textbook and into the imagination." Our girls will be able to combine their circuit drawings with Arduino to build limitless ideas! Help them create circuits to power our world!
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