Girls Math and Science Day

Worked as a volunteer at Girls Math and Science Day that was held in my department and the neighbouring one.

It is for school age girls and designed for them to experience scientific experiments and activities. It will stimulate their curiosity and interest in science, where there are lots of men but not so many women in many areas. Girls only? What about boys? I guess the point of this event is to show that girls are just as welcome to be interested in science. Boys are by default encouraged to do science, so girls would benefit extra encouragement to be comfortable saying they want to be a scientist.

It is an interesting event in light of gender equality because this event is encouraging only one gender of the society. It is justified and sponsored by many organizations. This sort of event will raise awareness and change the midset of parents probably too - letting them think that it is OK for girls to be interested in science. If I say "OK", it sounds like children need parental approval to like something, but it should not be like that...   

Anyway the activities my group had was interesting - plants that move, geometric probabilities, anatomy (eww..), and the scale of the universe.

1. Plants that move - typical plants that move are venus flytrap (why venus??) and trumpet pitchers (yes they look like a trumpet and a pitcher!). There is a viny parasitic plant called dodder. It looks like a thin yellow line or vine that twirls around another plants. It throws itself to hit a plant that gives off a smell, and it tells which plant is most preferred for them to parasite on! This plant likes to attack tomato plants and it preferrentially goes to a tomato plant rather than other plants. They can be found in Michigan too near a river bank. I will look for them!

The girls got a small Mimosa pudica, which closes its leaves when touched. The leaves are closed by the mechanism of a ball attached to the base of each leaf.

2. Geometric probabilities - where they did an experiment to randomly throw a bunch of sticks on a paper with lines and calculate the probability of the sticks that touch or cross the line. I think they calculated the ratio of (#total sticks /  # sticks that crossed or touched the lines). And voila! The ratio is close to pi (3.1415...). It brew my mind, and the parents'. We did not do anything with a circle, and why did we get a value that is close to pi? (but we need to test if the average value we get is really close to pi or not by a statistical test or some sort; we cannot say 3.11 is close just by the feel). The distance between the lines were twice the length of the sticks, so it is the same as the diameter of a circle that has a radius of the length of the sticks. But... so what? It was really intersting. It is a very nice way of presenting the fun part of probability and geometry.

Snack time - there was not enough snacks for everyone! I was running around looking for extra. Luckily I found a buscuit bar, but by the time it was given to the girl who did not get anything, we had to move to the next activity... That was not good...

3. Anatomy - mice and frogs.. eww. I couldn't even get close to them. Surprisingly 6 out of 7 girls were curious and were able to attend the dissection. One was totally not happy covering her eyes and ears all the time. I felt sorry for her. She can study plants!

4. The scale of the universe - we learned interesting things like "If the Sun is the size of 50 feet long conference room, Jupiter would be the size of a screen for a projector, and the earth would be the size of a soccor ball." "If your DNA in one cell is stretched, it will be 2 m long, and all the DNA in your cells put together, it would be the twice the size of the solar system." "The ratio of the number of your cells to the number of bacterial cells in you is 1:10. So we are 10 times more bacteria than human." "There are 8 million species on land and 1 million species in the ocean, but the number of species are increasing by new discovery."

I learned a lot from the lectures and activities!

It was my first time to volunteer in this event and wasn't entirely sure how it works - and it was kids involved! I don't know why I wanted to volunteer, but it was a good experience.  I need to be a different person when interacting with people, especially with children or non-scientists. Being approachable is more important than being serious!