Recruiting more girls into STEM in school

Partial reproduction, originally published Aug. 11, 2019 (Abilene Reporter News)

A city in the sky is nearly impossible.

How would water work? How would its people eliminate waste? What about food or simply not crashing to the ground under the constant force of gravity?

Technology doesn't have answers to these questions — if it ever will — but Wylie Junior High School teacher Luke Hurst still asked his Coding, Gaming, Robotics and Innovation classes to envision such a place.

Enter Kyla Paterson.

The incoming Wylie High School freshman spearheaded a group of students that designed such a dreamscape last school year.

"When she gets on Tinkercad (a computer-assisted design program), I can't keep up with her," classmate Alan Roberts said.

"No one can," CGRI student Chase Johnson added.

Alan and Chase grouped with Kyla for the project, which earned the highest score in Hurst's classes.

Why? Chase said the project called for a floating city design. Every other group's project had the city touching ground. Theirs was floating, though. Waterfalls even ran off the edge of the city just to prove there was nothing underneath. 

All Kyla's work in design. She just dreamed bigger than her classmates

And the water collection? Kyla came up with an interesting solution.

"It uses the water molecules in the clouds," she said. "The city separates the water for drinking and for plants (for food)."

Battle of the sexes

Hurst's CGRI class isn't just creating floating cities. It's essentially a class period filled with topics that might catch any type of student in its web.

They build robots, write video games and tell machines to do something with the stomp of a foot. In a perfect world, there would be hundreds of Kyla Patersons matching wits against hundreds of boys her age.

But this isn't a perfect world. And Kyla was practically by herself.

It's a microcosm of a national trend that has led to a plethora of research studies on reaching young girls before they bail out on science and math careers. 

Last year, Wylie Junior High enrollment was lopsided: 70 boys and two girls. Hurst, though, knows there are plenty of ways to reach girls who are looking to get involved in video game design or robotics or any of the problem-solving sciences.

It'll just take time and patience, he said.

"We might have to have some sort of after-school club or go to an all-girls class," he said. "Right now, the best thing to do is to group them together. There's a stigma in middle school that you have to break."

With Kyla, he fostered her natural sense of competition, he said. She simply had to put her classmates in their place.

"This class being full of guys, I (wanted) to knock their egos down a bit," Kyla said with a wry smile. "Whenever we're in gym, the boys always pass to each other. Not to the girls. So I (wanted) to show them we're smart."

Some years' enrollments are also better than others, though it hasn't ever been the 50-50 split Hurst wants to see. He's hoping a growing presence of engineering classes in Wylie junior high schools will help address the lack of diversity among his students.

"I started this with one class period," Hurst said. That was in 2016. Last year, he taught four. He couldn't teach five — he had to coach junior high football, baseball and track. 

This coming year, Hurst is not coaching and has pushed the CGRI program to six total periods — three at each of Wylie's two junior high schools — in hopes of finding even more students and helping them understand what their future could look like in a STEM field.

Why so few girls? We're not making science fun

Why is there a national, and international, push to involve more women and girls in science, technology, engineering and math?

The four subjects are critical to answering the world's top problems, be they climate change, overpopulation or starvation across the planet, among others. Tricia Berry, of the Texas Girls Collaborative Project and an engineering professor at the University of Texas, said the ideas developed by women, along with other underrepresented minorities, would go a long way to solving those issues.

"If we do not have women at the table helping to design products, helping to explore solutions, tackling the challenges we have in our world, we're not going to get the best solutions," Berry said. "We're missing the talent that's not contributing to those main challenges we have in our world."

The focus on recruiting women into engineering fields began in the 1970s, Berry said. It kicked into high gear in the '80s and early '90s, though, with targeted efforts making a little progress.

But stereotypes persist, she said.

For example, young students sometimes still picture the old, white, geeky, male engineer — the mad scientist.

"Middle school girls don't want to be seen as geeky," Berry said. "They lose the excitement and mystery that comes with math and science. We're not engaging them in the hands-on problem solving we know will get them excited."

Women who excel at math and science, research shows, don't necessarily study those subjects in college and pursue them in the workforce. 

Meanwhile, Berry said, boys who are good at math and science head into STEM careers.

"We do not do a good job showcasing how verbal skills, communication skills, people skills are critically important in the STEM fields," Berry said. "If we told a different story, we may be able to get to them before they go in a different direction."

From trucking to NASA engineer

It might not be a city in the sky, but Julie Webster did help put a probe in space.

Webster, operations team manager for the Cassini probe that spent 20 years orbiting and studying Saturn and its moons, said the secret to attracting more women to STEM careers is to get them when they're Kyla Paterson's age.

"What happens is we lose the women in middle school," Webster said during a March visit to McMurry University, where a group of students dedicated a monument to Cassini.

"Girls get interested in boys, boys get interested in girls, girls don't want to show they're smarter than the boys, so they start dropping out of the maths," Webster said.

Webster almost didn't pursue this life that saw her, among many other accomplishments, share in winning an Emmy Award for Cassini's final mission in 2017.

Nope, this Texas girl wanted to go into trucking. 

She was dead set on skipping college and settling into a career behind the wheel, she said. But her father had other ideas. And he didn't take no for an answer.

"When people ask me how I got into NASA, I didn't get into NASA," she said. "I thought I wanted to drive (a) truck, but my father said, 'You will not drive truck. You will go to college.' I was smart: class valedictorian, National Merit Scholar. I kind of randomly chose chemistry because I liked the chemistry lab. So, I graduated chemistry."

After a little extra school to earn a master's degree in mechanical engineering, Webster found herself bouncing around many jobs. After about 10 years, and 10 different careers, she was recruited to a civilian job at Vandenberg Air Force Base (California) and a position with the company that would become Lockheed Martin.

There, she started working with rockets and missiles — "so far afield from what my education is in," she said.

That work brought her into the Magellan project, the precursor to Cassini. She found herself in a strange position, where her coworkers weren't as skilled as she was.

"The conductors were not doing the procedure right, so I pushed them out of the way and said, 'Let me show you how I really meant this to be,' " she said. "I was the first woman test conductor. ... and after that it just kind of blossomed."

Webster stuck around Cassini for the probe's entire lifespan. ("I forgot to train anybody to replace me," she said with a laugh.) As new ideas and new missions came up, she would be responsible for a team making sure the probe was able to collect the data and get it back to Earth.