MidGLAM: Middle-school Girls Learning About Materials
Cecilia Leal and Robert Maass, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA.
Most female-focused engineering summer-camp opportunities offered at major Universities are dedicated to high-school students. While important, it is well-known that interventions at earlier stages are more likely to engage females in STEM. With this in mind, Cecilia Leal and Robert Maass launched the first annual summer-camp in Materials Science and Engineering devoted to middle-schoolers (MidGLAM: Middle-school Girls Learning About Materials) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The camp explores several aspects of the synthesis, characterization, and performance of structural and bioinspired/biological materials (Figure 1). Over the past three years MidGLAM has engaged student participants and organizers at several points of the education pipeline (middle-school, undergraduate, and graduate) coming from all socio-economic backgrounds. The Materials Today Agents of Change Award will enable three important missions: i) to sustain MidGLAM completely free to participants, ii) to empower graduate students to establish a set of protocols and guidelines such that MidGLAM becomes portable and easy to implement at other sites, and iii) to offer MidGLAM at neighboring minority-serving institutions.
This award will support our goal of increasing the number of females, in particular minorities, that declare an interest in Materials Science and Engineering and enroll a complete gender-balanced undergraduate student class by 2029. We also envision that collaboration amongst faculty and students during the implementation phase of MidGLAM at minority-serving universities enables a pathway for their students to transfer into UIUC’s Materials Science and Engineering program, which currently ranks #3 in the nation for undergraduate and graduate studies.
Figure 1 - Middle-schoolers play with bioinspired materials at the 2019 MidGLAM summer camp. AFM of butterfly wings and fly’s eyes revealing the intricate structure of natural materials. Our campers are encouraged to interrogate materials around us, think about what are they made of, and ways in which we can understand and mimic their properties to design the materials of the future.