“We’re doing a bionical hand, so we’re going to 3-D print the different parts of the fingers and we’re going to use some nuts and bolts to connect them and then we’re going to use something else for the palm of the hand,” Sophia said, in nearly a single breath, at a STEM Girls program at Golden Library on Jan. 30.
“Me and Maddie both want to be surgeons or something in the medical field, so we thought it would be cool to do something like that.”
The competition, sponsored by Jefferson County Public Library at the Golden branch, invites girls in grades fifth through eighth to enter projects that address problems related to energy and development, health and nutrition, or the biomedical field.
The contest was announced in January and on Feb. 22, contestants will present their projects to the judges — students from Colorado School of Mines.
It emerged from Golden Library’s STEM Girls program, in partnership with . The club gathers at Golden Library on select Mondays to set up stations where other kids can come and do science-based crafts and activities.
Bell Middle School science and STEM connections teacher Jen Flores helped start the program at the library about a year ago.
“I think Golden has a need for something like this,” Flores said. “I’ve always wanted to do some event like this for fun, where he middle school kids teach the elementary school kids.”
Similar to Bell Middle School’s iSTEM club, Colorado School of Mines hosts DECTech — which stands for discover, explore, create technology — for girls in grades third through sixth. Mines students who lead DECTech, including Shelly Konopka, will help judge the Girls in STEM competition.
“The goal overall is to get more girls to pursue more careers in STEM,” said Konopka, who is pursuing her master’s in computer science.
and her computer science students and Konopka said that at first, it targeted high school-aged girls, but it was not very successful.
“In high school they tend to lose interest,” Konopka said.
The group decided to take a different approach, starting with the younger grades with the hope that they will continue as they get older.
“I think that the main strategy is to just have those same students that we had the year before come back again,” she said.
Flores said the STEM program at Bell has not closely tracked whether its girl students continue in STEM in high school, but is starting to forge a stronger partnership with Golden High School this year.
For current students, she said she focuses on highlighting when a student excels and making sure they know that one bad grade does not mean failure.
“I really try to focus on the growth in their work,” she said.
Flores said about 30 of her students are working on projects for the Girls in STEM competition.
The Jan. 30 STEM Girls event was packed with more than 20 young girls running from station to station, the middle school girls building marble mazes and helping younger ones build balloon-powered cars from straws and Solo cups.
Itap meant to be a fun, play-oriented event where the middle schoolers can have fun with what they’ve learned in an informal setting. She said it also helps them hone their natural interests and what they might get excited about in the classroom.
“Thatap one of my favorite things,” Flores said.
Bell sixth-grader Hannah Lane was building marble mazes with classmate Adison Hopper, and showing other girls at the table how the project worked. Hannah said she chose to enroll in the STEM program at Bell because she had always been interested in science.
“I feel like its really fun being hands-on,” Hannah said.