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Highlights from Girlstart’s Scrub In Summer Camp

Is anyone here a doctor?! After this theme our campers have definitely been inspired to become one! This week, campers explored several different areas of the medical field, from bacteria and dissections to suturing and prosthetics.

Campers learned about the brain and the heart this week – but not just on paper! Girls got hands-on as they dissected these organs themselves. (Just to clarify, these were brains and hearts from sheep, not humans!) Curiosity overpowered any weak stomachs as girls discovered what was inside.

After taking things apart, the campers switched gears and put things together. Our doctors-in-training learned different types of sutures and practiced stitching up toy stuffed animals before suturing a real piece of meat. They also channeled their inner biomedical engineer to design their own prototypes for prosthetic limbs.

Many fields of medicine today use technology to their advantage. Campers made 3D models of ball and socket hinges and then printed them on our MakerBot Replicator 3D printer! They used high powered microscopes to examine different types of blood and then put on VR headsets to explore the human circulatory system. Girls even explored circuitry to create their own version of the popular Operation board game.

On Friday, friends and family visited to see all of the hard work their campers did during the week. Thanks so much to everyone who encouraged these young women in STEM!

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Meet the Summer Camp STEM CREW

It’s time for Summer Camp! The past two weeks our Summer Camp STEM CREW in Central Texas has been working hard to prepare all of the lessons and materials for the summer, as well as learning all about teamwork and leadership. Don’t worry, plenty of fun and silliness was had as well! At the end of the week, the STEM CREW did a mini-showcase to demonstrate all of their cool lessons and projects to the rest of the staff – it looks like this summer is going to be so amazing!

Watch this video to meet our Summer STEM CREW!

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Travel Camp Update

Summer is our favorite time of year, because it means camp! Not only do we get to host seven weeks of STEM fun at the Girlstart STEM Center in Austin, Texas, but we also have nine weeks of travel camp at 21 different locations across the country.

Our travel camp is delivered by our amazing traveling STEM CREW (Creative, Resourceful, Empowered Women), composed of small teams of 27 fabulous female role models. Girlstart’s STEM CREW make STEM fun, meaningful, and relevant for our campers and empower them to be brave, creative, and curious! Each week, our Girlstart Galaxy Summer Camp is put on for new groups of campers in multiple locations—from Texas towns such as Houston, Mission, Kyle, McAllen, San Antonio, Irving, Dallas, Buda, Bryan, Garland, and Grand Prairie to the reaches of Elgin, IL, St. Louis, MO, Sunnyvale, CA, Boston, MA, and Bellevue, WA.

As Girlstart takes a tour through the U.S. this summer, our Girlstart campers are taking a trip out of this world to explore the wonders of space. Girls discover what it takes to design and launch a satellite, live and work on the International Space Station, develop a shock absorbing system to protect astronauts as they land on the moon, and more. Campers channel their inner botanist as they create a device to grow vegetables in space, engineer a tool to take samples on other planets, and how to call Earth in this out-of-this-world camp. Additionally, girls learn about Ozobots, small line-following robots, and how to program them with both visual color-coded commands and online coding. The girls create their own unique rover map for their Ozobot Evo “rover” to travel through, following commands as it collects moon rock samples on a foreign planet.

We still have three weeks of our Girlstart Galaxy camp left and we’re beyond grateful for our travel STEM CREW and the opportunity to bring fun science to new locations! Keep your eye on the sky—one day one of our campers might be there!

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