Projects

Girl Scout Gold Award

  • Title: Inspiring young minds by their hobbies, Encouraging young hearts by engineering opportunities
  • Issue Addressed: Various journals, articles, and statistics have shown the decreased STEM education awareness in America along with more and more immigrant students pursuing STEM degrees in US rather than American students.
  • Target Audience:
    • Girl Scout daisies
    • Girl Scout brownies
    • Social media (Youtube)
    • Students in grades 2-4 that live in Massachusetts
    • Girl Scout Juniors
  • Goals:
    • Inspire elementary school children and girl scout troops to learn more about STEM
    • Help elementary school children and girl scout troops become excited about STEM so they want to learn more about ‘why’, how’ and ‘what’ of their hobbies and how they are connected to engineering
    • Keep the STEM interests in kids sustained through website and YouTube presentations.
    • Inspire more girls to be interested in STEM in an attempt to decrease the gender gap.
  • Addressed the root cause by:
    • Trying to understand what kids’ hobbies are and making a video on tying their hobby with an engineering angle
    • Doing 7 presentations through Zoom in which I shared the video
      • Asking children to share their favorite hobbies as a part of the introduction and then inspired them to understand the questions on “what”, “why” and “how” for their hobbies in the video, which in turn immersed them into the STEM part of their hobby
      • Finding different ways to make it interactive and engaging by asking questions and responding to other children’s comments and questions
    • Providing links to free online STEM games that teachers can tell their students to play in class or as a part of their past time.
  • Skills target audience learned:
    • Thinking about their favorite hobby
    • Connecting their knowledge to everyday life
    • Asking questions
    • Drawing technical pictures
  • Comments from the feedback form:
    • I learned “That when you recycle things it goes through a complicated process.”
    • “We liked the music and fun ways of explaining different types of engineering”
    • “I enjoyed most probably how there were many different types of engineers and you covered them all very well.”
    • I enjoyed “The questions that you directed to the people watching the video. It got me thinking about what I was interested in.”
  • Here are some other comments and thank you notes:
    • “Dear Anika, Thank you for teaching about STEM. I learned a lot from your presentation. I learned that when you recycle it goes into seven different piles like paper, glass, and cans. Good luck, Anika, becoming a technology engineer. Thank you, Evan”
    • “Dear Anika, Thank you for teaching us about STEM. Your video was amazing. There are so many different engineers that it is hard to choose just one. Both of us would want to be a software engineer or a website engineer.  Anna & Nik”
  • Project sustainment beyond my involvement:
    • Uploaded the 2nd video to YouTube and shared the link in social media accounts. Here is the link for the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PDrP4IHnT08
    • Shared the link for the video with all of the teachers and troop leaders I presented to, and they said that they would be happy to use it in the future too.