Women in Science

This morning I was working with a group of 6th graders on an engineering challenge to build catapults out of office supplies. This group of students has 7 boys and 2 girls in it. A ratio that, sadly, is all too common in school level science. We have been working on the project for a couple of weeks now and today we were test firing our catapults after the second round of revisions in design. All the catapults were pretty successful, firing between 9 and 30 feet. Right near the end of class, one of the girls pulled an interesting device she had built out of her pocket. She had been thinking about her catapult at home and had used a balloon and the top of a slurpee cup to build something that she thought would shoot our bead projectiles pretty well. After a little encouragement she agreed to let us try test firing it as well. On it's very first shot the bead not only went farther than every other design we had tried but hit the back wall of the lunchroom hard enough to roll all the way back to where it was fired from! Obviously, most of the groups are now trying to figure out how to incorporate her idea into their third redesign for their catapults.

There is an old myth still floating around out there that science is something that boys are magically somehow better at. I think that today was "myth busted," on that one for some of the boys in this group. Throughout history there have been many remarkable scientists, both male and female. Science doesn't know whether the person doing it is a man or a woman; and I was really glad to see this particular group of students realizing that.

About a hundred years ago a famous female scientist named Marie Curie made some very important discoveries involving radiation. She once said, "Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained." I hope all our Echo Loder scientists, girls and boys alike, will strive for success like Marie Curie did!