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Girls Enjoy Math, Science At SMART-Center Camp

Photos by Betsy Bethel Rachel Simon, left, places the pinnacle of her team’s index card tower on Tuesday during Girls Enjoying Math and Science camp at the SMART Centre Market in Wheeling, while teammates Vivian Bloomfield, center, and Grace Shanley watch.

Twenty girls sharpened their math and science skills and learned new concepts during the annual Girls Enjoying Math and Science — GEMS — camp at the SMART Centre Market in Wheeling on Monday and Tuesday.

The girls, entering fifth through eighth grades, conducted experiments and engaged in activities that included physics, chemistry, math, engineering, genetics and more, led by science educators Libby Strong and Robert Strong, the wife-and-husband team that runs the SMART-Center education program and SMART Centre Market interactive science store on 22nd Street next to the Upper Market House. (SMART stands for science, math, art, research and technology.)

Activities included, for example, using ping pong balls to study moon phases, microscopes to check out flatworms, telescopes to find spots on the Sun’s surface (there weren’t any!), gummy bears to learn about osmosis, and a math exercise in which they determined the thickness of a soap bubble (10 water molecules to 1 micron) and then ooh-ed and ahh-ed as Robert Strong created gigantic bubbles.

Campers commented on how much fun they were having.

“I like that they add humor to it because that’s not how a typcial teacher would teach things,” said 13-year-old Vivian Bloomfield of Bridgeport, an incoming Linsly School eighth-grader.

“I liked doing the moon phase activity. It was really cool,” said Sydney Fedczak, of Wheeling, who is 12 and entering seventh grade at Triadelphia Middle School.

“Well, it’s supposed to be fun!” Robert Strong noted. “There’s no test on this stuff, no quiz, no final exam. What this is, is girls enjoying math and science. Math and science are phenomenally fun.”

Added Libby Strong: ”The whole point of this is to sort of do some kind of mind-expanding, interesting kinds of activities where they will have positive interaction with math and science and to expose them to things they might not be otherwise.”

She first conducted the camp in 2005 and has done it every year since.

“There was research done that had shown that interest in math and science and participation in math and science fell off when girls entered middle school,” she said.

There usually is a fee for the two-day camp, but this year the Women’s Giving Circle of the Community Foundation for the Ohio Valley provided a $1,745 grant so the girls could attend for free. The grant provided for all the materials and time plus lunch, Kirke’s ice cream, and gift certificates for each girl to pick out items from the science store. Several chose the giant bubble apparatus they had seen in action.

On Tuesday, Carol Stevens, owner of CAS Structural Engineering in Alum Creek, W.Va., talked to the girls about careers in engineering. She started by asking them to list types of engineers. The girls raised their hands and waited to be called on, eventually naming more than a dozen engineering fields, from chemical and mechanical to metallurgical and environmental.

Stevens told the girls about owning her own engineering firm and how she gets to work on all kinds of projects ranging from the West Virginia Capitol dome restoration to new wastewater systems.

After Stevens’ presentation, the girls got into their assigned lab groups and were challenged to use 50 index cards to build as tall a structure as possible without using scissors, tape or any other materials.

The exercise was one in teamwork as well as engineering skills. Designs were started and scrapped. Towers tumbled down to the participants’ dismay. Groups sneaked peeks at the successes of others and then argued over whether or not to use the same design. In the end, the winning tower measured 36 inches, with second place at 33 and third at 26.

“It’s so important, I think, for them to have positive exposure and positive role models, and that was one of the reasons why I had asked Carol to come talk to the girls, too. I am a science educator but hadn’t worked as a scientist,” Libby Strong said.

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