This summer, in the heart of a metropolitan city along the Mississippi river, seventh-grade girls had hands-on experience in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for four weeks at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO).
As the Eureka!-STEM summer camp started off, the girls began learning about robotics. “They loved robotics, and it got them excited for what was to follow,” said Carol Mitchell to The Epoch Times. Mitchell is a professor at UNO who worked with the Eureka!-STEM camp at UNO.
The young girls found themselves launching rockets, airplanes, and balloons to high altitudes, learning about ecosystems, learning about military planes, and extracting fruit DNA.
The girl’s STEM-centered summer camp comes in response to a growing concern that women are not choosing or working in STEM careers.
Mitchell, who grew up in southern Texas, was the only African-American woman to receive a degree in chemistry at her university. “That was back then and we are now in 2012, but a number of girls who choose to go into a STEM career is low compared to the number of men, no matter what color they are,” said Mitchell.
“We need to increase the interest, but more importantly, increase the inevitability of women in these careers so they don’t think that it is something too hard, they can’t do it, while they have the smarts,” said Mitchell.
According to Mitchell, it’s about being invited into the playing field in STEM subjects. The Eureka!-STEM summer camp is lowering the level of concern that young girls might have regarding technology or engineering, she said. While they might have once said, “Well I don’t know about this, I haven’t heard about this, and I can’t do it,” Mitchell said that when they get into a biology class in the eighth grade, they will have a level of expertise already—they’ve already extracted DNA from fruit over the summer.
