Marshall County Girls Get a Head Start on STEM
Alan Olson Trending
GLEN DALE -- Marshall County's fifth-grade girls got a hands-on lesson in science and technology during the Girl Powered STEM Workshop at John Marshall High School Tuesday.
More than 140 students from all elementary schools across Marshall County attended the all-day event. Melanie Knutsen, Marshall County Schools' career development counselor, said the event was designed to get young women introduced to and excited about STEM activities, which is largely seen as a male-dominated field.
"Women are a minority in these fields, and we are encouraging more and more women to get involved in those fields," Knutsen said. "… It's the International Day of the Girl today, so we wanted to recognize that by having fifth-grade girls come down from all of our elementary schools to take part in some technology and STEM activities."
Students had a chance to interact with a number of different activities, ranging from constructing lava lamps to testing the buoyancy of paper to examining the lungs of a pig. Students from John Marshall High School were also on hand to show their younger peers the ins and outs of the educational materials.
Students also heard from Knutsen's daughter, Lydia Knutsen, a senior engineering student from West Virginia University's Statler College of Engineering, who told students of her education at Marshall County Schools and how Project Lead the Way and their CTE courses allowed her to further pursue her passions.
Glen Dale Elementary School student Lauren McGraw said she'd had a fun and educational day, still hanging onto a crafted learning aid consisting of a plastic tube and some balloons, representing a pair of lungs.
"We made two different crafts, one (representing someone's lungs) without vaping and one with, and it's way harder to breathe with the one that's (vaped)," McGraw said.