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Girl Scouts in Hazelwood District Learn That Engineering can be Creative
The Hazelwood School District (HSD) has partnered with the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri (GSEM) for a summer program help girls see science in a new way.
This summer, girls attending Hazelwood West and Northwest Middle Quest programs are participating in GSEM Girls Go Techbridge program, which offers science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programming. The program invites girls to brainstorm, design, build, test, and re-design a product.
Michelle Johnson, senior program manager of Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri, says the activities aim to ignite interest in engineering with girls’ love of being creative and artistic.
“It is key that we communicate to girls that engineers are extremely creative and they are problem-solvers, looking for ways to improve the world,” said Johnson.
For the project at West Middle School, students were put in groups of four and asked to create “The Business of Bubbles”. Within the groups, each girl is given a job title: mechanical engineer, chemical engineer, product manager and marketing specialist. There are four stations for the girls to work that accompanies their job title. The first station is the engineering station, where the girls build bubble wand. The second station is the chemical engineer where the girls mix correct balance of bubbles. The product manager oversaw the groups. The final station is the marketing station where the girls create how they will market product to the consumer.
After instruction from the Girl Scouts staff, the girls eagerly begin working together to brainstorm their ideas, sketching their thoughts on paper and running to the stations to start creating the bubbles or making a wand. The girls are assisted in every part of the production by a Girl Scouts staff member.
Christina Rodriguez, incoming sixth grader at West Middle School, says “Girl Scouts and the Go Techbridge has taught me to be creative and how to put things together. The program has taken my imagination to another level.”
