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Expo Aims To Encourage Girls To Study Science
February 15, 2006
By ROBERT A. FRAHM Courant Staff Writer
WEST HARTFORD -- From a second-floor classroom
at St. Joseph College, middle school girls tossed eggs from
a window Tuesday - strictly in the interest of science.
Using paper, balloons, duct tape and other household
materials, teams of girls built a variety of flight capsules
for the eggs, hoping for a safe landing.
"It's kind of like a spacecraft," said 12-year-old
Chelsea Wright, who fashioned a parachute-like craft using
plastic foam plates "so it floats down lighter."
Wright, a sixth-grader at Manchester's Bennet
Middle School, was among about 150 participants at the Girls
and Tech Expo, an event designed to encourage more girls to
think about careers in math and science.
"It's a field dominated by men," St. Joseph
President Evelyn C. Lynch said as she welcomed girls from
a dozen middle and elementary schools to a series of workshops
on topics ranging from solar power to Internet web page design.
The expo on the St. Joseph campus in West Hartford
attracted students from Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester,
Bloomfield, Farmington and Simsbury. It is part of a series
of similar events across the state sponsored by the Connecticut
Girls & Technology Network and the Connecticut Women's Education
and Legal Fund.
It comes as President Bush and others call for
an expansion of science and mathematics education in the nation's
schools. The president's new "American Competitiveness Initiative"
is designed to encourage children to take more math and science
courses and to make those courses more rigorous.
Educators and politicians say that too few students,
especially women, are choosing to pursue math, science and
technology careers.
"A lot of our educational system is still so
traditional and [tries] to get them into those traditional
roles for women," said Leanardo Watson, a teacher at Hartford's
Fox Middle School, who attended the expo. Watson advises Fox's
chapter of the Connecticut Pre-Engineering Program. This year's
chapter of 40 students has 18 girls, the most ever, he said.
Women continue to be underrepresented in many
science careers, accounting for just 14 percent of the engineering
and architectural workforce and 27 percent of computer and
mathematical occupations, according to 2005 figures from the
U.S. Department of Labor.
In Connecticut, women received 57 percent of
all bachelor's degrees at the state's public and private colleges
a year ago but only 15 percent of computer and information
sciences degrees and 19 percent of engineering degrees. Women
were well-represented in some areas, however, earning 55 percent
of the degrees in math and statistics and 61 percent in biological
and biomedical sciences.
"Let's face it - science and math courses are
hard work," said Liz Buttner, science consultant for the State
Department of Education. Middle school students face critical
choices, she said. "Do I stay in science courses in high school?
Do I stay in math courses in high school?"
Some educators at Tuesday's expo said they believe
too many girls still avoid those courses.
"We hope to catch them at this middle school
age [and] ... expose them to the fun side of science," said
St. Joseph chemistry Professor Diane Dean.
That was evident in the egg-tossing workshop,
where St. Joseph graduate student Theresa Smith gave a dozen
middle school girls a brief physics lesson on counteracting
the force of gravity and then asked them to design their flight
capsules. The girls gave the capsules names such as "Egg Survivor"
and "Egg Succeeder."
"Egg Succeeder coming down!" Smith shouted to
a group standing below the window. "Ooooh, that was a real
soft landing."
Five of the six teams had successful landings.
One capsule tumbled, causing the egg to slip out and crash.
"Because of the wind, it kind of like jumped out of the basket,"
said Breanna Edwards, a Fox Middle School eighth-grader who
made the capsule.
"It needed a seat belt," said Ellen Barnicle,
a St. Joseph freshman who worked with Breanna.
"Even if it broke, it wasn't a failure," Smith
said. "If it didn't work, you adjust your thinking. That's
what engineers do all the time."
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant.
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