Track: SciTech Festival Meet the Mentors
Did you know that several of the SciTech Festival events that happen during Festival season in February and March are actually planned and run by students? Join three of our very own students who will share how they each turned their ideas in to a STEM event success!
Presenters
- Chief Science Officer Johnathan, Metro Tech High School Graduate, “STEAM Week”
- Chief Science Officer Dominique, Casa Verde High School, “Casa Grande Union High School District SciTech Festival”
- Maeneka Grewal and Emily Wood, Xavier College Preparatory, “Girls Have IT Day”
STEAM Week — An entire week of STEAM events focusing on one letter of the acronym “STEAM” per day (Monday = Science, Tuesday = Technology, Wednesday = Engineering, Thursday = Arts, & Friday = Mathematics)
Casa Grande SciTech Festival — A school STEM festival that draws 400 student presenters and 3,000+ attendees. CGUHSD has been a part of the Arizona SciTech Festival since its inception and hosted the first Pinal County School SciTech event. The festival showcases how STEAM learning connects and empowers Arizona students in the competitive contemporary economy by helping students connect to STEAM across multiple disciplines. Through this Festival, CGUHSD students are excited to share what they have learned and look forward to providing experiential opportunities for others.
Girls have IT day — The primary objective of GHITD, simply put, is to promote middle school girls’ interest in the STEAM fields. This is done through an afternoon event where roughly one thousand girls from middle schools around the state, of which over half are Title 1 schools, visit Xavier College Preparatory and participate in an event filled with various activities focused on particular experiments, research, and new developments relating to STEAM. Next, the aspects of the day themselves will be described. The basic rundown of this event includes a welcoming address, a guest speaker presentation about fascinating work they do in the STEAM fields (ie- dolphin research), a performance that incorporates technology (ie- dance performance on hover boards), and then an exploration period where girls can visit over one hundred different activity booths filled with experiments, inventions, or guest speakers. Xavier’s own students run these booths voluntarily, and love to engage with the middle school girls. We like to encourage this near-peer mentorship between the high school girls and middle school girls, hoping to inspire this next generation of future scientists and mathematicians. GHITD also has a number of companies that host booths, such as Intel, Arizona Science Center, and Grand Canyon University. We want to emphasize that we aim to inspire the next generation of innovators and creative thinkers, especially within the young female population. Thus far, the event has been incredibly successful with over 92% of girls inspired to work harder in school, and 91% declared GHITD gave them the opportunity to explore new ideas. We hope to accompany this summary of GHITD with a power point presentation filled with data and photos in an interesting manner, and hopefully a video that demonstrates the passion and excitement that drives this day.