Author: Casey Hatfield

When 3rd grade teacher Christie Crouch studied biology in college, she often looked around her classes and noticed only a few other women in a sea of men. She said it sometimes felt like a game of “us against them.”

A few years later, the tables have turned. Crouch now champions Girlstart at Brookhollow Elementary in Pflugerville. It’s the club’s first year, and Crouch said nearly all of the fourth and fifth grade girls flocked to the sign-up sheets at the start of the year. So many, in fact, that the club had to be split into two sessions — one each semester.

Thursday, the class buzzed with excitement about this week’s project. About 30 girls took turns investigating what makes insulated cups so good at maintaining beverages’ temperatures, just like a new product engineer would. By the end of the hour, each girl had made her own version of a Yeti cup.

Crouch floated around the classroom with a smile on her face. She helped the girls cut tape and watched proudly as they presented their prototypes.

“The picture of what it looked like to be in science was very different back (when I was in school),” Crouch said. “It was fun, but I want to see more representation. It takes things like Girlstart to make that change.”

activities ,education ,engineering ,experiments ,Fun ,girls ,hands-on ,kids ,math ,science ,STEM ,technology

Samantha looked at the pile of office supplies in front of her. The heap of common objects sent her mind racing in an attempt to make a “flinker”– a device that both sinks and floats. She selected a cork— an item that’s slightly less buoyant than a sponge— to be her base. Now to make it sink, just a little… she attached two paper clips, two washers, and two binder clips to the cork. On second thought, a packing peanut might be necessary to offset the weight of the metal objects. She bound the mashup together with masking tape: it was almost time to test the flinker.

While she waited for the other girls to finish their projects, Samantha wondered aloud whether she could use the ideas she had come up with to create a real boat. Another girl chimed in, saying maybe this is exactly what people who make submarines do.

The girls may be onto something here. In a sense, a submarine is just one giant, fancy flinker. When marine engineers set out to make a submarine, they must think about buoyancy, relative density, problem solving and engineering design— the same concepts Girlstart girls learned about this week.

So, like a submarine, Samantha hoped her flinker would stay hovering in the middle of the water without dropping to the bottom. She plopped her creation into a cup of water, and Voila! It worked. A perfect balance of density and buoyancy, the flinker was a success. Who knows? Maybe we have a future marine engineer on our hands.

activities ,education ,engineering ,experiments ,Fun ,girls ,hands-on ,kids ,math ,science ,STEM ,technology