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Empower Girls to Embrace their Digital and Entrepreneurial Potential

The heart of GEM

As part of the GEM Project, we organized a number of summer schools for girls age 12-18 over the course of 2020-2022.

Participants of our summer camps engaged in a lot of exciting out-of-school STEM activities. They spent an inspiring time with other girls discovering what science, maths, engineering and technology (STEM) can offer them because STEM is part of most solutions to a healthy environment, a lively society and a thriving youth.

Based on research and experiences from the summer schools that were organized, the following five principles are important for a successful summer school.

It is very beneficial to use contexts that are relevant for society, are authentic and show how STEM skills can be used to help others. Research and our experience show that females are more likely to choose STEM if it enables to make a positive difference in the world, for example, by showing applications of STEM in medicine, waste reduction or climate change. It can be a good idea to advertise a STEM activity for girls not by emphasizing a subject, for example “learn how to code” but naming the real-life benefit of it “coding for promoting the virtual security of children”. Real life issues are also a promising context to examine issues from multiple perspectives and involve skepticism when discussing potentially biased information.

It is important for a good learning success to work with inquiry-based activities during which girls can do science, explore and be creative in contexts where science makes a societal difference or relates to social scientific issue. It proved to be great practice to include a final session for exchanging findings or present a self-developed product at the end of the summer school. This means that during the summer school girls were often designing and developing a product on their own in small groups. Demonstrating high level of curiosity they searched solutions to problems in playful way, while being accompanied by a mentor.

As research shows and our experiences confirm, it is important to involve female role models coming from professional STEM sectors. Currently, when asked, only a small percentage of girls can name a female STEM scientist or professional they look up to. It is however of big importance to see female role models to be able to identify oneself with STEM experts and eventually choose a profession in this field.  Girls need to receive the message that women can work in STEM careers and be successful and fulfilled in their work life while still having a personal life, and they need to receive this message repeatedly. While piloting summer schools, female mentors were involved in various ways: we engaged professional yet approachable female lecturers and mentors to talk about their experiences and lead the sessions, as there is a positive and significant association between the proportion of female teachers in a high school and the likelihood that a female student will choose a STEM-related major (Stearns et al., 2016). We also involved young female mentors with a STEM-related background as adult group leaders and working phase leaders. In this way a mentor would follow a group of students for the duration of the summer camp.

Female role models can be involved in demonstrating the entrepreneurial aspect of STEM. Additionally, opportunities though local and national businesses should be showed to discover the different STEM job options in the local surroundings. It is of an additional value, if some tasks in individual work phases are involving entrepreneurial goals, such as helping the girls to improve their ability for opportunity recognition, critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills, being comfortable with risks and promoting creativity and innovation.

It is cruical to develop a safe learning environment where it is made explicit, that making mistakes is ok. The participants should enjoy STEM in an inclusive and supportive educational environment, working jointly on a variety of STEM projects, experiencing being a part of a STEM community. Girls require a special culture of feedback, e.g. in case of ‘failure’ it should be referred to a lack of effort instead of competence, and the activities should be designed in such a way that they can experience success and have it recognized. Also, gender-neutral environment helps making progress and helps the girls to step out of their comfort zone and try STEM out.

Past Summer Schools

Here are some impressions from our GEM summer schools:

This project is co-funded by the European Union under grant no. LC-01380173. The European Union/European Commission is neither responsible for the content nor liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.

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