FemSTEM 1: Finding Mathematical Relationships
This year I officially became president of FemSTEM, a club inspiring middle school and high school girls in all aspects of STEM. This club has been part of my school for 7 years, with the founder continuing to MIT and many members pursuing various STEM careers. It is my goal this year to weave mathematics into each and every meeting, demonstrating how connected science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are.
September 24th kicked off my first meeting as club president. Our activity consisted of a variation of the egg drop. The girls first got a crash course lesson on basic physics principles: forces, accelerations, spring constants. After that, they jumped headfirst into their activity.
Procedure: They put an egg in the back and tied a rubber band around it. They then dropped the egg from a height and recorded how far the egg dropped down if they kept the top of the rubber band in the same place. Each time, they added another rubber band and repeated the experiment.
With some of the girls being as young as 6th grade, they probably hadn’t experienced data collecting before. It was really interesting to see how they recommended methods to their high school mentos on various ways to collect their data. There were also many heated debates over what the independent variable and dependent variable would be. A couple of middle school girls were just learning was independent and dependent variables meant and they were so excited to actually use that knowledge in a hands-on activity. It goes to prove that what you learn in the classroom is found everywhere in the real world, no matter how simple or complicated the concept is.
After all of their data collecting was done, the girls then moved on to find a relationship. They took their knowledge about independent and dependent variables and translated that to an axis on a graph. The girls once again were amazed at how what they were learning could be applied to the experiment. Once they plotted all of their data points, they very quickly spotted linear relationships. I explained that this was known as a “scatter plot“ since individual data points are plotted before looking for mathematical relationships
Some of the high school girls knew exactly what to do from there, but the middle school girls were a little stumped. Once they all remembered the general equation for a line (y = mx + b), they were able to start finding the different vales. I loved watching as they struggled with what each letter represented (m for slope and b for y-intercept), and what steps they took to calculate them. Some of the girls took a rougher approach by just visualizing it, but after providing the general equation to calculate slope, they were able to increase the accuracy of their lines.
After each group obtained their equations, I gave them each a height to plug into their equation to find how many rubber bands would be needed to safely drop an egg from that height. The groups that took a rougher visual approach were significantly farther off than those who took a mathematical, algebraic approach, but no group completely failed in their calculations. We briefly explained that what they came up with was only a predictor of values and therefore was not 100% reliable, as they witnessed first hand. Already, the girls were introduced to and roughly understood at least four new mathematical concepts: scatter plots, regression lines, line, and slope equations, predicted values.
This entire experiment allowed the girls to get to know each other a little better. They also got to put what they learned in the classroom to use while also learning some new information. This meeting was a good first start to the year as all the girls had so much fun experimenting with each other, fighting over various experiment methods, and struggling over new mathematical concepts while familiarizing themselves with basic physics principles.
We are all excited for the rest of the year, and I can’t wait to see the girls’ STEM knowledge and confidence grow.