Maker Girl Mania: Inspiring Future STEM Leaders

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Thank you for joining us today as we talk about inspiring the future of STEM leaders for tomorrow. This is a case study in two different programs aimed at elementary and middle school girls.

My name is Laura Kalinowski, and I have over 20 years experience of teaching at the secondary level, and currently at the post-secondary level. I am the co-creator of Maker Girl Mania, along with my colleague Lori Banaszak. In addition, I'm teaching at our Oakland Community College as an adjunct professor.

And for my district, I am the subject area coordinator for the Career and Technical Education. For Oakland County, I am our Engineering, Architecture and Design Educator Referent Group coordinator, as well as the Engineering Club and National Technical Honor Society advisor for Clarkston schools.

As a kid, I was always really curious about how things worked. And so it was really frustrating to my parents growing up because they'd get me a toy and I'd immediately take it apart to see what the inner workings were for it. I also like to make everything for my Barbies, and I spent a lot of time in the summer with my dad learning how to use all the different hand tools. There was a lot of time in that garage, and eventually I got old enough to work in there by myself. And I made a lot of messes in there, but Mom and Dad were pretty supportive in helping me work through that, and then they'd send me back in to clean that garage back up.

AMY PORTER: Hi. I'm Amy Porter, and I have spent the last 25 years in education, having taught at the middle school, high school, and college levels. But mostly my time has been focused at the high school, teaching CAD, architecture, and engineering.

Along with my colleague Christine Trent, I am the facilitator of Tech Girls at Farmington Public Schools. I have the position of the District Instructional Leader for Career and Technical Education. In addition to Laura, I am a member of the Oakland County Architecture Design Group, and I am a member of the Michigan Industrial Technology Education Society.

So my story is a little different. I got into engineering because of a boy. He was a senior, I was a freshman, and he went into this really cool room every day. My junior year, I was able to take classes, and I fell in love with engineering and CAD and design.

Between my junior and senior year, I was able to go to engineering camp, and that's where I quickly learned that I didn't want to be an engineer because all the math equations had letters and not numbers. So I decided to go into industrial design at the University of Michigan. However, on the day that I showed up and we were drawing naked models, I decided this wasn't for me and went into teaching instead.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Amy and I have implemented programs in our respective school districts that target our younger female students and encourage them to participate in non-traditional careers. Some of the areas that we want to look at today are the gender gap, creating an inclusive learning environment, the success factors that we've had, and then how you can create your own program in your district.

AMY PORTER: So let's go ahead and start talking about the gender gap. I don't think I probably need to point out to many of you that there's a lack of females in many of the STEM careers out there, being Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. These numbers are from 2019, so they're pre-pandemic. And as you can see, we had about 19% representation in architectural engineers, 18% software development, 17% software engineers, 10% electrical engineers, and then all the way at the bottom, 8% in the mechanical engineering field.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: These numbers that you're looking at here is our female student enrollment in STEM classes, specifically in architecture, engineering, and computer science from just a little over 10 years ago. You can see that Michigan and my school district, Clarkston schools, are pretty similar with the percentages that we see.

This is a little surprising to me because I have been teaching for a while, and when I was in high school I was the only girl in the classroom. When I went to college, I was still the only girl in the classroom. And then even in my early teaching career, I was still the only girl in my classroom, and I just wasn't sure why that was a thing that kept happening.

There are some obstacles that female students face when going into a STEM classroom. And if you're unfamiliar with what STEM is, that is the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math curriculum.

What we see is that the lack of access to programs. Not every school district is able to offer STEM programs. So it's a little inconsistent with that. And the school districts that do offer it often have retired engineers that are the teachers for that. There's a real lack of those role models. I will say, in Oakland County, where Amy and I teach, that doesn't seem to be the norm. It's about 50% of our teachers of the STEM programs are female.

There's the cultural stigma. There's still what we would consider a girl job pathway and a boy job pathway. And even if you're looking down the aisles as you're going to the store and you see the blue aisle for toys, you'll find that a lot more of those toys are based on competition and problem solving, and the pink aisle toys are a little more focused on fashion and beauty and motherhood.

We know that there's a sharp decline of enrollment by girls in STEM programs by eighth grade. And most of our programs that we do have that encourage STEM careers are targeted more at those high school students. So if our students don't make it into those ninth grade classrooms, they may not know what careers are available to them.

AMY PORTER: Now, in Michigan we actually have a great program that's available for us from the Michigan Department of Transportation. They have a track program that goes through civil engineer and transportation. They will actually train teachers, give them the modules, the lessons, and supplies, and refill those supplies every year, which is a nice thing.

They offer a bridge building competition that students can participate in. And if you are a teacher participating in the track program, your students are available for an internship their senior year with MDOT. So it's a great opportunity.

Also, another program that's available that I personally teach is the Project Lead The Way curriculum, PLTW. You are required to be trained in the PLTW curriculum, which is rather expensive. And the curriculum itself is actually rather expensive as well. So that makes it hard for most districts to use the program since it is cost prohibitive. But they do have a tie-in with Autodesk as well.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Amy and I teach in the automotive hub of Michigan. We're really fortunate to have so many wonderful universities that specialize in engineering right in our backyard. So our students are often able to attend summer camps or exploration days without having to go very far. A lot of these summer camps and exploration days show a variety of different career options available to our students within the STEM fields.

And aside from that, there are also some wonderful after-school programs and clubs available to the students in our districts, like the FIRST Robotics club. That started back in the '90s, and that was actually my first introduction in high school to engineering.

And there's also Science Olympiad. That's a Michigan-based program that has now gone nationwide. And they host competitions for students in over 10,000 elementary schools right now. They promote hands-on learning in those STEM areas.

AMY PORTER: Another program we have in this area, thanks to Lawrence Tech University, is the ACE program. It stands for Architecture, Construction, and Engineering. And the students are actually paired with-- the high school students are actually paired with someone from industry, and they get to work on real-world problems.

Lawrence Tech provides them with a laptop throughout the duration to work on these projects. And it gives them a great exposure and opportunity to explore these areas, also to build connections with people in industry. And it is completely free for the students, but they do have to apply to the program.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Let's start getting into the programs that Amy and I have created. We know that companies with diverse leadership are more profitable, socially responsible, and have higher-quality service. We need women in these decision-making roles. We need women who are designing the products that we use. We need to have a seat at the table.

Girls Who Code is a relatively newer organization. They started about 10 years ago, specifically to get girls and nonbinary people enrolled into computer science classes. They offer clubs, summer programs, and they even have support for women and nonbinary people who are in their college student or early career.

Lori Banaszak is my colleague, and she is the administrator of our Technology Integration in our district. She's always been on top of technology trends, and once she heard about Girls Who Code, she brought that here to Clarkston schools. She started with one elementary, and within just a couple of years she had implemented a coding club in every one of our elementary schools.

Lori and I have worked together along with a few other colleagues to create some programs specifically for our younger female students, targeting that upper elementary group. We started with summer camps. That turned us into creating a Women in Engineering club at the high school that helped to mentor those summer camps.

And then Lori and I began planning Maker Girl. We were seeing success on a small scale but we wanted to make it a bigger scale. And after our first year, we had experienced wonderful success, and then we doubled our capacity to having 600 participants.

AMY PORTER: So the program we have at Farmington schools is Tech Girls. Every district in Michigan that has a CTE program has to do a state report, and our annual state report found that our female enrollment was very low in STEM classes. So we actually had to come up with a plan to target that.

Mark and Heidi Skodack were the teachers at the time, and they started Tech Girls to address that shortage in 2006. Our program is directed towards the eighth grade students. We do it just prior to class scheduling, in hopes that they will like what they do at our Tech Girl event and sign up for the classes the following year. And part of our program is having high school students mentor these middle school eighth grade girls when they come in.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: All right, let's talk about Maker Girl. So Lori and I created this program. It's a one-day STEM event that targets specifically girls, kindergarten through seventh grade. I will say that we have a lot of little brothers that are running around the event, too. So it's open to everybody but we're specifically targeting our female students.

Most of our participants come from around the Clarkston area, our district specifically, but there are a lot of other districts in our surrounding area that their girls come for that day. But we also have a lot of Girl Scouts from all over southeast Michigan that also attend.

We break our day into two 3-hour sessions. We have a morning and an afternoon. And then we have an hour break in between, and that allows us to train our volunteers, feed our volunteers, and resupply any materials that we need to.

The cornerstone for our program is to make a core memory. Over my years, I have been fortunate enough to talk to a lot of women who are in the engineering field, and I always come back to the same question of, how did you get into this? And it's usually sparked by some moment that they had with a parent or a coach or a scout leader where they made something together, and that started their career.

So knowing that, Lori and I wanted to specifically include parents into the day. And whether it's the parents are just there to encourage them or they're holding something while their child cuts it, we wanted to create a moment for them.

We also wanted to have something like a character that's walking around. So we came up with Millie the Maker Girl. And the idea was to have almost like a Disney princess, but cooler, to walk around and interact with all of our makers. It's kind of like a Disney princess but better.

So I teamed up with a local artist from our area, and I told her what I had in mind. I needed a character to bring this to life. Now, Wendy Popko happens to be my sister, so of course she was able to help me out. She was happy to do that.

And I talked to her about how I wanted it to look like. She made her own costume, that she was a little steampunk. But that tends to be a little dark in the color area. So I wanted it to be bright and-- the most important part, though, was that I wanted our makers to visualize themselves as Millie. So she needed to be in that same age group.

And after we had the character, I put my mom to work. Because if you're related to me, I put you to work, I guess. But she helped me create the skirt and the wings. We dressed my daughter up and kept her walking around the event and interact with all of the little girls. And she has the best job, because her job is simply to talk to everyone and encourage them, make alongside of them. And after that first year, we started seeing some of our makers return as Millie themselves.

We have over 25 stations that we create. We swap the stations out, so they are different every year. We wanted to create a safe space for kids to learn, and we wanted it to be fun and exciting for them. But another important piece for us was to create hands-on projects, things that they could take home with them, because we want that learning to continue. We wanted them to be able to show their parents that didn't come with them, or their brothers, or to take it to school with them on Monday and show their classmates what they had learned.

We focus on three main areas-- engineering, coding, and art. Some of our stations, we will switch over from year to year. Like one year we'll have the Great Maker Race, and the following year we'll do soldering, because those tend to be really big stations. Sometimes we have fan favorites, like making duct tape bracelets. Or face painting is always a lot of fun for the girls.

It's really important for us to involve our community. We invite vendors in from all over the metro area. Great maker works comes in, the American Foundry Society, the Society of Women Engineers, our local library, our robotics team, which I've mentioned a couple of times, and our Science Center and Art Institute.

When I'm going through the process of designing a station, some things that I want to keep in mind is that some are going to have more technical skills than others. Some will have a little more problem solving built into it, where there's a little longer seat time. And others are going to be just a little more on the artistic side, more creative side, with less seat time. So it's important to vary those things. We have just a block of time that we're working within, so it's important that our students aren't getting stuck at just one station for the duration.

It's also really important that you work through all of the stations and test them out. I've come up with some cool ideas, but it's either not ready for Maker Girl because it's too challenging and it would be really hard to make sure everyone was successful, or it was maybe not ready safety-wise for the younger kids to be using.

This is an example of one of the stations that we would have. It's a light-up postcard, where we are using a circuit marker and some glossy photo paper. We give them a little light-emitting diode, along with a little battery. So they're given instructions that show them how to create a simple circuit.

And we want every student to be successful, so this is at a very basic level. But what we find is that our students are going to elevate their thinking, and they try to see how many LEDs they can fit on with one battery, how many they can put on with two batteries. And some just want to see how many pompoms and googly eyes they can fit onto their paper.

The directions are another important part to this. Not only is it a basic instruction with a simple graphic, so it's easy for most people to follow. We can't always guarantee that there's going to be a volunteer at the station, so allowing our students to work at their pace and be able to be problem solvers on their own helps to build their confidence, too.

So you can see here on the right, we have one of our Daisies that has her light-up postcard. Up at the top, we have our Brownie creating a hot foam car with the cutter there. And then at the bottom, we have someone learning how to use Tinkercad.

We do need a lot of volunteers. That is the thing that makes our day the most successful. And we get them from all over. We have our Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts that volunteer. We have our Honor Society students from all over the area that are looking to get those valuable volunteer hours.

Students that had participated in Maker Girl when they were younger are now coming back and volunteering as mentors to give back to the program. Our robotics students are huge with helping with volunteering for the day, both in creating a station for themselves and also helping out at the other stations.

We have college students. Most are involved in some type of engineering or computer programming pathway, and they want to come in to give back. Our industry partners, our community members, teachers, and of course our parents.

AMY PORTER: All right. So I'm now going to talk to you about Tech Girls, which is what we do at Farmington Public Schools. If, after hearing about Laura's program, you're a little sketched out, I can assure you there are much smaller opportunities for exposing girls.

So, again, Tech Girls formed to address the need of lack of females in our STEM classes at Farmington Public Schools. For our activity, it's held at the high school. We try and do it at both high schools so students can see what the classrooms look like before coming there next year.

We have mostly our robotics students, our female robotics students. Our robotics team is called the HackBots. So they have an all-girl spin-off called the Lady HackBots. They come in and help mentor the students. And we also have some advanced engineering and architecture students that come for the day.

You can see here in the picture, that's one of the Lady HackBots, and she's leading the students through a soldering activity. That's the KELVIN Decision Making Kit, I believe. We normally only get to hold this once a year. Again, we try and do it right before scheduling so we get their interest piqued and they sign up for it. And for our program, it was initially funded by Bosch, via great grants they give to our schools, and the Farmington Education Foundation.

So, again, you can see here we have one of the high school mentors working with one of the eighth grade girls on a welding activity. The whole idea behind this was to make a fun night for the girls. There's a lot of fear sometimes when it comes to taking these boy classes and possibly being the only girl in there. So we wanted to show them like it was fun, it was cool, and that they could totally do it.

Again, we pair the students with a high school student to serve as a mentor to see like, OK, I can do something like welding, or soldering, or stuff like play with the robot. And it was to help build their confidence in these classes so that they would sign up.

So, again, our focus is a lot smaller than Laura's. It's held one night after school. We have four main components to it. We have the team-building component. So we provide dinner, normally pizza, salads, stuff like that.

We give all the girls a T-shirt. You could see some of the pictures. The girls were wearing them, the Tech Girls T-shirts. We give them swag, like keychains, or USB drives, or little backpacks. And just want them to feel very welcomed and part of something.

For the engineering aspect of our night, we do things like the picture you saw, which was the decision-making kit, which you can buy from KELVIN. We've also done circuit bugs, which involve an LED, some wires, soldering, popsicle sticks, and pipe cleaners, and they form it into like a little bug.

And then we normally have our LEGO MINDSTORMS for the students to play around with, which are the LEGO robots. Or the robotics team will have one of their past robots out there.

Under the architecture component, we normally have our student architecture models that were previously made using our laser cutters. We will have photorealistic renderings that were created in Revit, and using Lumion as well. And then the animations that we've had students make, again via Revit and Lumion.

Our auto teacher is wonderful, and he comes in to do the automotive component so we can get more girls in those classes. He normally has a car up on a hoist, and he'll walk them through maybe where parts of the car are, or he'll have an oil change or something going in process. And then he is also the one that starts to lead the welding activity for them that night.

All right. So we've talked about our programs, so let's talk about some of the challenges we have in our programs. And you can see there's a lot of different things we face, and we're going to go through each one of them right now.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Funding our programs, at least for Maker Girl, is pretty expensive. When you figure we have over 25 stations and 600 girls per station, those materials get to be pretty costly. We want it to be cost friendly to families, so I do spend a lot of time writing up grants. And I will say that there were a lot of our local foundations that were eager to help us get started, but they've been less inclined to sustain our long-term funding.

AMY PORTER: And in regards to funding, Laura's is obviously a much bigger activity. It's all day. Something like our after school is much easier to fund. So if you don't have a large budget or access to a lot of money, doing something like Tech Girls is a little more easily accessible for most.

We also struggle with volunteers. Laura needs over a hundred volunteers, which is insane. Since COVID, a lot of people don't want to be in big areas with a lot of people, and a lot of students are not interested in volunteering any more. So that becomes a struggle.

For both of our programs, we heavily on our robotics teams. And if you know anything about FIRST Robotics, their schedules are insane, especially when it comes to build season and competition season. So planning around their schedule, since they're such a large component of both our programs, can be very hard. And then again, for Laura, she's got to be able to feed all those volunteers, which is also a large cost.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: As you can imagine, Amy and I spend all day talking to our students and teaching. That's really what our time commitment is. But outside of school is when I have to plan Maker Girl, and that requires a lot of planning.

So my evenings, my weekends, and my summers are often creating stations or reaching out to local vendors, ordering supplies, unpacking those supplies, repacking those supplies, storing them, and, of course, having to write up all of the directions for the stations. And because we're teachers first, that makes sure that all that extra time is done outside of that school day.

AMY PORTER: And we can design these great programs but how do we get people to them? And that's another struggle. For my program, we rely on the middle school teachers to get out the word.

We rely on the district email to go out to parents. And then the district will post it on the Facebook page for our district in our schools. But parents don't always read emails. In fact, they rarely read emails. And so getting the word of mouth out there can be hard.

I can say I know for Laura's program-- I grew up in the area and all the people I went to high school with, their children have gone to Maker Girl. So she's doing a great job getting the word out. but it can be hard to get the word out there.

And as well as that, scheduling. For my event, sometimes we're not able to do it until right before, which makes it even harder to plan, because we don't know when the counselors are going to do scheduling. And so we end up with a week's notice to get the word out, which makes it much harder to get students involved.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: And our location is important to us. Maker Girl is both an indoor and outdoor program. We have several stations on the outside of our cafeteria and then all throughout the cafeteria. So if we have bad weather, those stations are scrapped.

The other difficult part to that is our school is used heavily by all different groups-- clubs, the drama club, our cheerleading students, and outside groups too, like craft shows that come in. So we're always being very careful about the time that we're allowed to actually plan when it's going to be. It's a small window that we have to work within.

AMY PORTER: And it's sad to say but there is community pushback. Despite the fact that Laura and I see it reflected in our classroom, despite the fact the data shows we need more females in STEM careers, a lot of people out there feel like having female-only activities is not fair to boys and other students. So, unfortunately, we both receive pushback in those areas.

So we talked about challenges. Let's talk about successes we've had. And you can see here we're going to go over again a bunch of different things with you guys.

So once you've got them interested, what do you do? Again, Laura's programs tend to focus more on the elementary and building them up throughout the years in her district. whereas mine, we try and get them right before scheduling their eighth grade year so they take the classes in high school.

But once you've got them interested, how do you keep it going? Classes and, in my case, clubs that help keep them interested. Of course, in the instance of a club, you want to have something that meets regularly so that you can keep the engagement and excitement active.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: And building confidence is important. We always want to make sure that there's an appropriate level of challenge for our students. We want them to be successful, though. That's going to build their confidence up. And then we want them to elevate their learning with that extra extension learning.

And we want our learning to be purposeful. Our students want to connect to the real world. They want to feel like they're making a meaningful difference. They also want real technical skills and something that will translate to their future life.

AMY PORTER: One of the key components of both of our programs is the volunteers and the mentoring that happens. And as teachers there's nothing greater than seeing your students teach something you've taught them to someone else. It's the ultimate goal as a teacher.

So the mentorship that both our programs allow our high school students is amazing. Our high school students get to have an impact on a younger person's life, and those younger students get to see someone that they can look up to and perhaps aspire to be someday. So we love the opportunity for mentorship, also with companies outside coming in as well, helping those students.

Now, if you are a CTE teacher, you are probably an island. You are probably the only person in your school. You may even be the only person in your district or area. We are very lucky, Laura and I, in that we have a very strong group of people that get together in Oakland County. This is a picture from FANUC. It was one of the field trips we get to take. And you can see there that they were learning-- we were all learning about the robots and the industry and the program that they have in our area.

It's good to have a group of teachers that you can rely on, because we do all stand alone, but it's also good to bring in industry. We want to be sure we're teaching and exposing our students to things that industry needs or does or is using. So having a support system is extremely important.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: So this is just a reminder of the female enrollment in my district from about 10 years ago in our architecture, engineering, and computer science classes. And then here's our most recent numbers. You can see there's quite a bit jump there.

So I am no longer the only girl in the classroom, which feels great. And we are a leader amongst our county, and amongst our state as well. So you can see here's our state average numbers. And Clarkston again is one of the top in the state.

And just as a little point of pride for us, Clarkston has our 25 top scholars for our district. And of those 25, last year 22 were female. And of those 22 female students, over half of them had attended a Maker Girl.

So let's talk about how you can create your own programs in your community. So a few tips. I would say if you are a teacher and you're interested in this, a great place to start would be a club or a program. There's a lot of things out there that are ready to go, like the LEGO FIRST competition. There's Science Olympiad, Girls Who Code.

And if you're an administrator, support the STEM curriculum with as much as you would a college readiness program. Encourage those field trips, and support female-centric programming. And if you're from industry, you could provide mentorship. You could be a career day speaker. You could sponsor a field trip, lend that financial support. Donating materials, equipment, and supplies can go a long way for a teacher.

AMY PORTER: And we touched on this earlier. A lot of girls are kind of scared to take our classes because they are the only girl, or it is a boy class. So you want to design programs that instill confidence.

One thing I tell all my students in this class, you want to fail and fail often. And you can see from the graphic on our screen, FAIL is your First Attempt In Learning. Nothing you do in the design world is perfect the first time. We're always going to be tweaking something.

So it's OK to get it wrong. It's OK to have to go fix it. And so we want to make sure our girls, especially, build the confidence in that area.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: And we've talked a little bit about mentoring today, but it's true-- we need to connect our older and our younger students together. We want our younger students to see those role models, and we want our older students to be those role models, give them that leadership opportunity.

And, also, let's connect our older students with industry. It can really help them to see their career pathway. And foster that learning community for teachers. We want to be able to work with each other in the same disciplines, but also work with industry to make sure that we're current in our classrooms.

AMY PORTER: And as we conclude today, we want to leave you with this fabulous quote. And we're hoping that you saw ways you could implement this in your own areas, ways you can help, and ways you can help increase females in STEM.

LAURA KALINOWSKI: Should you have some additional questions, here is the contact information for both Amy and I.