Ed.–Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, sponsored by DiscoverE (formerly the National Engineers Week Foundation), is celebrated on Feb. 20. Longtime OSC education specialist Steve Gordon explains why the Center designed a special summer program for middle-school girls more than a decade and a half ago. For information on supporting vital summer STEM programs at OSC, please visit: https://www.osc.edu/education/give.
A well-trained science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s ability to innovate and compete on a global scale. Yet, “women are vastly underrepresented in STEM jobs and among STEM degree holders despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce,” according to a 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Entering its fifteenth year, the Young Women’s Summer Institute at the Ohio Supercomputer Center was designed to help address this issue – to interest girls in STEM careers by immersing them in a weeklong, residential camp.
Research has shown that early attitudes towards science and math influence their decisions about future careers. Negative stereotypes of engineers and scientists as undersocialized nerds make those academic and career paths less appealing to girls, who are often more interested in social relations and societal well-being.
Girls' learning styles also are 
different and may be negatively impacted by our traditional methods of teaching science and math. Girls approach problems from a different point of view. They generally look for interrelationships and interdependence in the phenomena they study, in contrast to the hierarchical, reductionist approach we often use in teaching science and math.
YWSI was designed to counteract some of these trends by focusing on a hands-on, problem-solving approach to a scientific question. Under the guidance of experienced middle-school teachers, the girls meet with naturalists, water-quality experts, scientists and computer technologists to 
conduct real-world scientific investigations. These current sixth and seventh graders visit nearby Big Darby Creek to survey water quality and plant and animal life to learn what constitutes a healthy or unhealthy stream.
The girls then become watershed detectives using federal data about an Ohio watershed to determine what parts are unhealthy and why. They use computers to explore the data, visualize the stream network, land use and water quality measures, and test hypotheses about the causes of environmental problems.
The detective work is mixed with games, exercises and other activities to keep the girls engaged and to allow them to have fun while they are learning. They experience a small dose of campus life by living in dormitories on the campus of The Ohio State University. There also is a career night for them to meet graduate students studying a variety of scie
nce and engineering subjects and to play a career game that exposes them to the wide range of careers in science, engineering and technology.
A longitudinal study of the participants conducted after the program’s first ten years showed that three quarters of the girls had continued on with courses in science and engineering. Several of the older girls have completed doctorates!
We hope to continue for many years into the future to inspire the participating girls to seek science, engineering and technology careers.
