Girls in steam
Team 812
Every year, Team 812 hosts a Girls in STEAM Conference. With the hopes of inspiring middle school girls to pursue FIRST and careers in STEAM, Team 812 has refined this conference over the past three years. We invite professionals from all over San Diego County, including UCSD, SDSU, Qualcomm, Illumina, and Northrop Grumman to help with a speed mentoring workshop. During this workshop, female STEAM professionals meet with girls in 15 minute sessions to talk about their careers, challenges they may face, and give general advice. We also hold a body empowerment workshop led by peer counselors from the Chelsea’s Light Foundation, and lastly, an engineering workshop where girls build and/or program. Most recently, our participants built mini windmills with Legos, testing their knowledge of gear ratios to create the fastest rotating blades. Due to the success of the conference, we packaged our conference into a toolkit for teams and other organizations to use. The toolkit is available, along with resources for other Girls in STEAM projects in San Diego, on our partner website The Athena Project.
