The National Girls Collaborative Project

I'm writing to share some of my experiences from  2012 National Collaboration Conference hosted by the National Girls Collaborative Project last week.  I had the opportunity to meet dozens of representatives from girl serving STEM organizations and discuss how we can collaborate to move towards supporting more women and girls in STEM.

Among the organizations I learned about at the conference was the National Center for Women and Information Technology.  The NCWIT website is full of information and resources for increasing the participation of girls and women in computing and IT.  They also sponsored the Collaboration Conference reception and the Coalition co-hosted some fun, hands-on activities along with our friends at CAISE and Techbridge.  Check out the fun we had!

We adapted an activity from the NISE Network and made edible gummy capsules out of cranberry and grape juices, using food grade sodium alginate.  The result?  Science you can eat!

 

Here's Kalie from CAISE talking about a few activities available on HowToSmile.org.  This website is full of fun, high quality, hands-on activities!

And here are some of the fabulous folks of Techbridge, including Executive Director Linda Kekelis.  One of the highlights of the Collaboration Conference for me was attending Techbridge's workshop on career exploration in engineering.  When designing engineering activities for girls, I learned that it's important for them to see real life examples of women who are passionate about their jobs and doing interesting things with their science training.  We watched a video from PBS' Design Squad that was great for prompting discussion and setting context for engineering challenges.

I left NGCP feeling inspired and motivated to keep looking for opportunities to collaborate and work towards a brighter future through science in after school!

Check out the Science After School Consumers Guide!

Have you seen the Science After School Consumers Guide? The Guide grew out of early discussions amongst Coalition founding members about the need to have a guide to the high-quality, hands-on science content that is available for use in out-of-school time settings. The Lawrence Hall of Science spearheaded a project to find those resources, and conducted a review with the support of the SEDL National Center for Quality Afterschool. 

After an open-nomination period, submissions were reviewed for various indications of quality and categorized by grade, target audience, cost, and subject. Users can search for curricula, activity kits, instructor guides, and web sites that offer appropriate content for learning science on out-of-school time. Real educators from across the country rate and review the resources, and can submit new resources that they think are missing from the Guide.

In addition, the Science After School Consumers Guide partnered with the folks at the Science and Math Informal Learning Educators (SMILE) Pathway (which we profiled here last October) to feature free sample projects and activities from many of the resources listed in the Guide. Check out the bar on the right side of each resource's page to see the activities featured on howtosmile.org (such as here, on the Fetch! page).

For more information on high-quality science curriculum, check out the Coalition's Afterschool Science Activities and Curricula page.

Have you learned How to SMILE?

There's a great new way to find fun science and math activities--and to share your own! Howtosmile.org has just launched as a place where educators in non-school settings--like zoos, museums, and afterschool programs--can communicate and share their STEM activities. As of this writing, there's already over 1000 different science and math activities posted! 


Here's how it works. Once users create an account, they can post guides to their favorite projects. This includes a description, time, materials cost, and subjects addressed, among other things. Other users can post comments on their experience with the activity and even try to tweak it. Activities can be added to user-generated lists to create collections of similar activities, and users can earn badges and points based on their participation.

"SMILE" stands for Science and Math Informal Learning Educators, but howtosmile.org can be used as a resource in lots of settings by non-educators too. Many of the activities are simple enough to be done by parents and kids at home, or by non-scientists in community groups, like Girl Scout troop leaders. The interface is simple enough to use that kids could search for interesting activities on their own. It's free to join, and if you get started soon, you'll have a chance to win an iPad!

Howtosmile is a joint project of science educators and researchers from across the country, including the Lawrence Hall of Science, The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC), the Children's Museum of Houston, the Exploratorium, the New York Hall of Science, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). 

The Coalition for Science After School is proud to be a national partner!