Girls Engineering, Math and Science (GEMS) Conference
*The event has already taken place on this date: Sat, 05/07/2022
Please help us keep this calendar up to date! If this activity is sold out, canceled, or otherwise needs alteration, email mindy@kidsoutandabout.com so we can update it immediately. If you have a question about the activity itself, please contact the organization administrator listed below.
The main goal for GEMS is to expose middle school students to different opportunities in STEM fields and to spark their interest in these types of career fields. Our goal is to create an awareness of the current inequality in careers in STEM career fields and provide students with the knowledge and power to create a future of shared respect in these fields. We are excited to invite our middle school girls and their parents, teachers, community leaders, and successful professional women all together, in an effort to boost knowledge and interest in various disciplines of math, science, and engineering. Our unique program will allow girls ages 11 to 14 to choose various hands-on workshops. This is a great opportunity for students to establish new connections and friendships.
According to Alysson Light, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of the Sciences, “While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of the students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science…across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields – describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding. Read more about Dr. Light’s study here. While this program targets female students, registration is available to all qualifying students regardless of their sex or gender identity.
We also have a Mini Parent Conference in the morning!
We believe understanding your middle school student is important. We provide all parents with the opportunity to stay and enjoy our guest speakers in the morning. We provide two presentations to the parents on higher education and a topic that is relevant to raising a middle school student. In the past, topics have included ‘Timeline for College’, ‘Keeping your Teen Safe Online’, ‘Helping your Teen with Anxiety’, ‘DOJ Human Trafficking’, and more!
*Times, dates, and prices of any activity posted to our calendars are subject to change. Please be sure to click through directly to the organization’s website to verify.