Inclusive opportunities in STEM
Creating inclusive opportunities to maximise diversity in STEM.
Sydney Secondary College, Balmain Campus (SSCBC), has a multifaceted STEM program that engages female students through a variety of technologies and activities.
Four initiatives
They have four key initiatives to engage their female students in STEM:
- Stage 5 iSTEM electives
- Girls STEM club
- Robotics club
- STEM hang outs
In addition, they:
- offer many excursion opportunities
- offer outreach opportunities for their network school
- are building a strong team of passionate and knowledgeable teachers.
iSTEM electives
They offer four unique 100-hour Stage 5 iSTEM elective courses. The iSTEM course document allows for great flexibility. It provides a voice and choice for both students and teachers to:
- share and develop their knowledge and skills in STEM
- engage in topics of interest
- choose and shape topics from those available.
They have found that explicitly naming their electives has garnered interest, especially from their female students. Almost 45 percent of students choosing a STEM elective are female.
In Year 9, students can choose ‘MedTech and Brain Cognition’ and ‘Hidden Figures: Women in STEM’. In Year 10, students can choose ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘3D Design and Innovation’. These topics are taught by different teachers with their specialist interests and knowledge.
Hidden figures: women in STEM
Hidden figures: women in STEM is an iSTEM elective that is open to all students but was designed to help engage female students. The mission of this course is to show students that STEM careers are a real possibility by:
- explicitly learning about historical women in STEM
- meeting contemporary women in STEM.
The school believes that diverse representation and perspectives in STEM learning content and materials can further inspire and build confidence among students from diverse cohorts that they belong in STEM.
Students learn about famous women in STEM and replicate some of their experiments. They conduct research and create their own teaching resource to deliver to primary schools in their network. This helps build student confidence in designing and presenting solutions to problems. Students also build a robotic arm in collaboration with UTS Women in Engineering and IT (WiEIT) staff and the STEMX impact team, which includes a variety of female mentors, guest speakers and experiences.
Girls STEM club
Their Girls STEM club began with 15–20 students and has grown to 30–50 students. It runs on one afternoon a week. Girls have been involved in a range of STEM-based activities including:
- STELR (Science and Technology Education Leveraging Relevance) solar car challenge
- UTS data arena and protospace
- reverse garbage and FIRST robotics competitions.
Mentors from UTS WiEIT facilitate a term-long project with the club including drones, robotic arms and medical technology.
Robotics club
The robotics club runs twice weekly and invites all students to join in with Lego EV3s and Arduino robotics. The club has competed in LEGO soccer and is a great place for students to explore coding and 3D printing.
STEM hang outs
The STEM room is open in the mornings, recesses and lunches most days of the week and on Friday afternoons. It has become a collegial space for many students, mostly girls, to tinker with technology, complete homework or work on a bigger project. The STEM hang outs space gives students a more relaxed way to interact and experiment with the available technology.
Benefits
- An increase in female students engaging with STEM opportunities
- Students displaying greater confidence when using varied technologies and communicating their thoughts and ideas –such as when students designed and delivered STEM activities at local primary schools.
Promoting STEM pathways
During numerous activities the school strives to highlight the range of STEM career opportunities and diverse pathways available to students.
Female astrophysicists, data scientists, coders, engineers, builders, neurologists, virologists and more have been arranged in collaboration with companies such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB), UTS Women in Engineering and IT (WiEIT), Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), and STELR.
