Milwaukee-area Girl Scouts experiment with careers

From Milwaukee Sentinel: Milwaukee-area Girl Scouts experiment with careers
When Claire Fieber asks her Daisy and Brownie Girl Scouts to describe a scientist, many of them dream up the same kind of person - an old white man with wispy white hair in a white lab coat.

Rarely do any of the Girl Scouts visualize a female scientist first.

"A lot of times girls don't see women in those roles, so it doesn't even cross their minds that they can do it themselves," Fieber said.

As an urban and Latina outreach specialist with the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast, Fieber is helping reshape girls' perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics - the so-called STEM fields - and the ways they envision themselves fitting into those careers.

During the past three years, the Girl Scouts organization has amplified STEM education efforts in its mission.

While Scouts still sell the organization's trademark cookies and volunteer in their communities, STEM represents a primary focus of the Girl Scout group.

With the demand to fill 155,000 STEM jobs in the state over the next six years, according to the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America, the Girl Scouts program hopes to ignite girls' interest in STEM careers.

Tracy Wayson, chief development and brand officer for the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast, also hopes to boost girls' confidence in their ability to pursue those fields.

"We know that girls are lagging in general in terms of selecting STEM careers, and we're missing out on having girls of color in that pipeline," Wayson said.

Thanks to support from community organizations such as Time Warner Cable and Rockwell Automation and two grants from the Opus Foundation, Wayson and her team have provided engaging, hands-on STEM programming.

While the first Opus grant in 2010 covered start-up costs, including staffing and partnerships with outside initiatives, the second grant in 2011 is activating STEM programming through three main outlets: outreach, robotics and special programming.

About 60% of the Opus Impact Fund that the group received helps implement STEM activities into outreach programming, a special set of troops from low-income communities and schools led by professional staff members such as Fieber.

Many of these activities explain how concepts that girls study in school relate to real-world applications.
Hands-on experience

In addition to learning about the characteristics of a scientist, Fieber's outreach troop conducts several experiments.

One aims to help girls understand the importance of hypotheses. Without knowing exactly what they're making, they mix glue, water and borax, learning how to measure materials and follow directions in the process.

But before mixing, they hypothesize what the materials will create and compare their educated guess to the end result - a slimy, Silly Putty-like substance.

Other STEM education opportunities revolve around robotics, which include teams; events and workshops; and summer camps.

The events are progressive so girls continuously build on their robotics skills with age.

Using complex equipment called Lego Mindstorms and knowledge of robotics from previous years, Junior Girl Scouts in grades four and five assemble a simple robotic machine that runs off solar power to learn about renewable energy.

Robotics competitions at regional, state and national levels each year challenge Girl Scouts to accelerate in their teamwork and leadership skills.

The Opus Fund also allows the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast to partner with community organizations and expose girls to STEM environments through special programming.

On Saturday, special programming took the Scouts to Milwaukee Area Technical College in Oak Creek, where a workshop engaged more than 100 girls in welding and other fields.

"The welding was really cool because I like kind of creative ideas," said Melissa Ziegler, 12.

Other instruction areas included architecture, civil engineering and carpentry - all taught by female professionals who serve as STEM role models for the next generation.

"When you ask kids today what they want to be, not very many people say, 'I want to be a biomedical engineer or I want to figure out how to build skyscrapers,' " Wayson said. "So we are really giving girls a whole new view of what they can be and helping them see themselves there."