Carol Carter, our Core 21 science expert, decided to examine how rural girls respond to a summer science experience.
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Rural Girls Rockin’ Science and Engineering
Rural Girls Rockin’ Science and Engineering was developed to introduce and encourage girls in rural areas to investigate science and engineering ideas and concepts. Through parent surveys we were able to collect data related to parental attitudes towards their daughters' involvement in science and engineering and ascertain if those attitudes changed after camp.
This camp provided girls with physical science core ideas dealing with forces and interactions and with engineering design. Students explored magnetism and gravity and investigated how patterns of motion can be used to predict future motion. Students worked with magnets and paper clips, wheel and axle systems and rotating tops. Students then used their knowledge of science to enter the engineering design process by designing and building a cart and through the process refined their science understanding.
The topics were science based but the integrated learning approach included mathematics and language arts skills for a complete learning experience.
Subject areas were integrated for a complete learning experience.
Throughout the camp, students engaged in science and engineering practices to collect data to answer questions, and to define problems in order to develop solutions. Participants kept science notebooks to collect data and make sense of the ideas and concepts being explored.
Students read articles that covered specific concepts, after the concepts were introduced in the active investigation. The text and illustrations helped students make connections between what they experienced concretely and the ideas that explain their observations. Vocabulary development was purposeful and new vocabulary was introduced at the time it was needed in the active investigation allowing students to make connections.
