By Anna Skinner
After feeling as if she wasn’t prepared early enough to follow a career in engineering, Emmalee Severson is organizing a program for girls in fifth and sixth grade to explore STEM (science, technology engineering and mathematics).
“I am currently looking to study engineering when I go to college, and I always felt like I didn’t have the experience that some people had with computer science or programming or anything science related,” the Westfield High School junior said. “I just felt everybody else got involved earlier, and I wanted to give girls an opportunity to get involved earlier.”
Her program, Girls Rock STEM, will occur Feb. 20 at Westfield Intermediate School from 10 a.m. to noon. All WIS science teachers handed out forms for girls to sign up. The program is free, and it runs off of donations and sponsorships.
Severson will be organizing five different stations for the girls to take part in. Some stations allow students to learn how to use science to make ice cream, play with robots or extract DNA from fruit. The five stations focus on various topics: physics, chemistry, biology, environmental and computer sciences.
“I want to show them that they have a lot of opportunities. Like in engineering, there are so many routes to go and so many opportunities for the future that girls are just starting to get introduced to,” Severson said. “A lot of times in science classes you don’t get the fun side, and I want them to experience the fun side and see what they can do with it. Science isn’t just reading textbook pages and taking tests. It’s hands on, and you can do fun things with it.”
If parents would like to register their child and need a form, they should contact the student’s science teacher.
