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Organizers of the inaugural Girls Bridging STEM Fair share a simple wish for participants: “I really want them to have fun,” says Kelly Trinh, a senior at Henrico County’s J.R. Tucker High School, president of the school’s Computer Science Honor Society and past president of Tucker’s Girls Who Code club.
“I feel the same; I want them to have fun,” says Yvette Lee, who teaches the AP Computer Science class at Tucker and sponsors several STEM-related clubs, including the CS honor society and Girls Who Code.
“We want the fair to be fun and interactive,” says Priyanka Mathur, a Virginia Commonwealth University senior majoring in chemical engineering and president of the university’s Society of Women Engineers chapter. “We want to plant a seed or show [girls] something that gets them a little bit interested.”
The free fair, set for Friday, March 15, at VCU’s Engineering Atrium, is being offered to middle school-age girls and nonbinary students to demonstrate the breadth of STEM fields and encourage them to consider STEM career paths. At least 50 middle school students are expected from the city of Richmond and Henrico County, but up to 100 can be accommodated.
A Pew Research Center article from April 2021 notes that women earn the majority of all undergraduate and graduate degrees but a minority of engineering and computer science degrees: 22% and 19%, respectively, in 2018.
VCU’s Mathur, who plans to pursue a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, says the Girls Bridging STEM event will show middle schoolers a variety of engineering options — chemical, mechanical, biomedical and electrical along with computer science — through hands-on activities. One experiment, commonly referred to as “elephant’s toothpaste,” features a simple chemical reaction that yields copious quantities of a substance that could be used to clean a large mammal’s teeth. Another planned activity will involve fashioning mechanical hands from popsicle sticks.
“A lot of engineering involves design and problem-solving,” Mathur says. “It’s hard to know what you want to do [for a career], so we want to give them a taste of what it’s like to do engineering with activities that mimic real life.”
This year’s fair represents a rebirth of sorts. Several years ago, VCU’s SWE chapter hosted a similar event, but for high schoolers. Lee brought students from Tucker to participate and reconnected with Mathur, whom she had taught at Tucker and who was already involved with SWE. This year’s event came about after Lee suggested to Trinh that she approach the SWE chapter to see if they would be interested in partnering with Tucker students to create something for middle schoolers. The partnership has worked well, Trinh says. “Working with [the VCU] students has been great,” she says. “We meet almost every other week, and we’re able to bounce ideas off them.”
Trinh, who plans to study computer science at Columbia University after graduation, says she was drawn to the field after seeing a college-age friend writing code. A summer camp at VCU where she learned how to program a robot to stack objects into a tower hooked her further, and then she took AP Computer Science Principles with Lee. “The process of debugging and getting code to work is satisfying and exciting,” Trinh says.
“I really want [participants] to leave [the fair] with the same feeling I felt when I did my first program at VCU,” she adds. “I hope they develop a new interest in engineering or STEM or they just learn something. Maybe something piques their interest and they find something to explore further. Maybe they realize they don’t like STEM. I just hope they leave with a fun experience.”
Mathur says she joined VCU’s SWE chapter as a freshman during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the chapter wasn’t able to meet in person. Now, she says, the chapter is making up for lost time. “This year, we’ve tried to do a lot of different things,” she says. “We’re meeting twice monthly and cover a variety of topics that people want to talk about.” And, she says, the Girls Bridging STEM Fair is a way for the organization to engage with the community beyond VCU’s campus.
“I’m so glad they had this idea and that we can participate,” Mathur says. “I want women in engineering to have the support and feel confident in pursuing engineering and not be scared away. It’s all about your abilities and who you are as a person, not whether you’re male or female.”
