STEMGirls Milpitas HS challenge young learners with virtual summer program

This summer, 100 Milpitas Unified School District 4th-6th grade students have been immersed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through the STEMGirls Milpitas High School’s 2023 STEMpower program.

STEMGirls Milpitas HS partnered with the MHS Math Club, Medical Society, Environmental Society, and Aerotech to organize this ongoing summer program, with a focus on STEM subjects that often intimidate students or certain populations like women are underrepresented in.

STEMgirls President Savan Bollu worked alongside STEMgirls officers Tvisha Nepani, Lauren Lee, Ling Casenas, and Cassie Salazar to facilitate the program, along with 15+ volunteers from all participating clubs on designing the program.

“Each club designed an experiment; we ordered necessary materials; STEMgirls took care of outreach/logistics; we collaborated with clubs on assembling the kits and distributed them to parents in a drive-through at Russell; and we are in the process of teaching our four virtual demo sessions,” Savan explained.

The experiments that students are working on are:

• Making blood slime to understand and model the components of blood. Led by Medical Society;
• Learning about statistics (mean, median, mode) with M&Ms so students can make predictions about the color composition of their own M&M packets, led by Math Club; 
• Exploring causes of sea level rise like thermal expansion through a mini-model. Led by Environmental Society; and 
• Finding the center of mass of an object through various methods. Led by Aerotech. 

“We have loved seeing parents encouraging their students to participate in such STEM programs, and even more, seeing students that consistently join our virtual sessions, ask questions, and are super curious about STEM!,” Savan added. “We hope to help them feel confident asking questions, tackling difficult subjects, and solving global issues in the future.” 

In the four programs STEMGirls has hosted so far, they’ve had more than 550 participants from over 22 schools. This is a recap video from the summer 2021 program: https://youtu.be/CVaS4v6Q410.

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