I’ve
done so many amazing things with Girl Scouts over the past eight years. One of
the most enjoyable things I’ve done is participate in a unique cookie reward
program at Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana called “CEO For
a Day,” two years in a row. To win this award, I sold over 2,500 cookies both
years. After working hard to sell as many Girl Scout Cookies in the cold weather
as I could, it was a blast to get together with the other top four Girl Scout
sellers, get the inside scoop on what goes on at Girl Scout HQ, and spend the
day with the wonderful Girl Scout staff. Also, the top five sellers continue to
convene for PR events such as TV interviews and autograph signings at Chicago
Sky basketball games.
Another
one of my favorite Girl Scout memories is competing in the inaugural ComEd
Icebox Derby competition, an event created by the CEO of ComEd to inspire more
girls to enter science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and
fight to increase the meager 24 percent of STEM jobs held by women. When Girl
Scouts invited me to apply for the competition, I jumped at the chance.
My
team had to make a refrigerator into a racecar. After working hard with my team
on our car, we
Another
big, inspiring Girl Scout STEM activity for Juniors was Marie Curie Chemistry
Day, where I conducted high school chemistry experiments in a college
laboratory setting. How inspiring this was to me as a fifth-grader, carefully
titrating an acid!
This
year, Girl Scouts is sponsoring my FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of
Science and Technology) FTC team, geared for seventh- to twelfth-grade girls.
FTC is an international competition revolving around problem solving, robotics,
engineering, and programming. The team is learning Java, which is a programming
language that is in widespread use in the tech industry. Prior to FTC, I
participated in FIRST LEGO League (FLL), which is split into four parts:
Missions, Technical, Research, and Teamwork. Missions, being its most famous
portion, involves teams of 3–10 kids building a robot to complete in
two-and-a-half minutes as many missions as it can on a four-foot by eight-foot
table. Then, in the Technical session, the teams present to judges designs for a
robot that they’ve programmed, explaining to them the characteristics that make
it unique. For Research, teams focus on a different important issue scientists
and engineers are currently working on every year, and work to find and make an
innovative solution. Finally, in a Teamwork session, a panel of judges analyzes
the teams’ ability to work together on a complex question/problem within a time
constraint of two to three minutes.
I
remember the first year my team, the Newton Busters, competed. We had worked so
hard, so many hours, and thought that we fourth-graders were surely going to
crush the big eighth-graders. We got the Rookie’s Award, and we were happy with
that.
The
next year we made it to the state competition, and we have done so every year since.
Through our PID (Proportional Integral Derivative) line follow, and our
patentable and viable solutions to everyday problems, my team has grown
and FLL has become part of our lifestyle, taking us as far as Germany and
Australia to compete. I’m so grateful to Girl Scouts for all the
opportunities that were made possible through FLL, since they were there for me
from the beginning.
I’ve
always been involved in STEM, playing with Snap Circuit kits and building
robots from an early age, and doing projects like rewiring my basement with my
dad. I love every bit of it. And I love to dive into new areas of STEM, since
these fields are so expansive. There are so many possibilities—and there’s
something for everyone. Making things explode for work? Reusing a fridge for a
car? STEM’s the only place you’ll be able to do things like that.
At
the DELL Lounge Event, I enjoyed seeing the leaps that have been made in
technology, big and small. Trying on the Oculus Rift was like entering a new
world. Seeing myself as a hologram was so cool as well. My two friends and I
competed with three non–Girl Scouts in a recycling quiz, and one of the girls,
Izzy from Troop 41302, won a new tablet!
If
I could say anything to girls about STEM and robotics, it would be to just try
it. If you find you don’t like physics, try your hand at programming. There’s
way more to STEM than just one topic!
You can really lose yourself in STEM activities—spending year
after year after year, and hundreds of hours programming, building,
brainstorming, and innovating in a basement, with your friends, or even at
national competitions. And the rewards of STEM, like those of Girl Scouts, are
endless.