Upcoming Projects/New Updates! 11/09/19: Girl STEMpowerment is excited to announce new updates within our organization! This year, more of our chapters will be holding an All Girls Math Tournament in their areas, including Massachusetts (at MIT), Maryland (at John Hopkins University), Virginia, Indiana, Indonesia, Maryland, and New Jersey! We are excited to increase the scope of girls we impact with our larger events, such as our All Girl Math Tournaments.
Our Arizona Chapter will also be holding the first ever All Girls Biotech Camp (in partnership with Arizona State University and TechGirlz) in the spring time, as well as an All Girls Hackathon in the summer. Stay tuned for more details!
Finally, our Arizona Chapter is also currently implementing a new project with students around Chandler, Arizona. This project will be in partnership with the Arizona Sustainability Alliance and is called "Food Tech for the Future: Growing Digital Farmers". In this project, we will be building food computers with middle school girls, while teaching them about the intersection of sustainability with technology. A Food Computer is a "tabletop-sized, controlled environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber to yield various phenotypic expressions in the plants" (MIT Media Lab). Agritech education is something that many organizations do not touch on, and our organization is unique for teaching this topic! We will be using grant money received from Vital Voices Global Partnership Group, and Ascena Retail Inc. to fund this project, as well as thousands of dollars in grant money that the Arizona Sustainability Alliance (AZSA) has received from tech companies such as Microsoft, COX Communications, etc.
9/17/19: Girl STEMpowerment recently presented at the Arizona STEM and Innovation Summit, which attracts around 1,200 attendees annually! Our organization partnered with Intel to put on an interactive presentation in which we had members demonstrate the application of programming, specifically with the computing platform Arduino. Members competed in competitions to see how who could code the fastest/create the most appealing design on LED boards that were attached to the Arduino hardware.