They’re Learning STEM Skills by Dancing to Destiny’s Child

At the start of the L train in the upper-class Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, there are 10 city-funded Wi-Fi hubs within two blocks. When the train hits Brooklyn, two miles east, there are another six Wi-Fi hubs being installed in the hip East Williamsburg area. But the numbers start to fall as the train dives deeper into Brooklyn, where poverty is rampant. By the time it hits the neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville, there are none.
Out here, almost a third of homes don’t have internet access — the gateway to a community’s broader participation in STEM industries and the jobs they offer. High schools, meanwhile, are under-equipped with the basic infrastructure needed for internet access and technology education. Music, dance and the arts, in contrast, are well established in the community.
This disconnect — in the midst of a national trend to move funding from the humanities to STEM — is what led Yamilée Toussaint, a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT, to start STEM From Dance, a program for high school girls that merges the local culture of dance and music with a future in learning complex science and technology concepts.
“Students who would be a natural fit for, say, a career as a coder don’t necessarily know that until they are introduced to it,” Toussaint says. “Through dance, we’re attracting them to a different world that they wouldn’t otherwise opt-in themselves.”

At STEM From Dance, students learn to code stage and costume lighting along with visual effects for their performances.

Toussaint, a tiny woman with large hair and a soft voice, created the program five years ago. Normally it spans a full semester, but this year she increased the number of girls she can reach with a summer intensive curriculum focused on circuitry.
During the course of one week, participants practice a dance routine that they pair with lessons on building and coding circuits.
“It was hard at first,” says Chantel Harrison, a 17-year-old participant from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what it was about, honestly.”
Harrison and a couple dozen other girls are taught to wire battery-powered light circuits. They sew them into their dance costumes to create splashy light effects synced to a song’s beat. For many of them, this is their first introduction to computer science and coding.
And that is a stark reality check. In New York City, where technology often seems boundless — and where there have been huge strides to build up “Silicon Alley,” New York City’s own version of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley — kids educated in the city’s outer borough’s face significant barriers to a future working in the tech industry.
“If we cannot allow our children to have first-class computer equipment in a first-class city, they’re not going to be prepared to be employed at a first-rate corporation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tells NationSwell. “We cannot have a digital divide in our borough and in our city.”
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have pushed for high-speed internet access and STEM course integration into the city’s high school curriculum by 2025. But in Brooklyn, a study published in December 2016 by the Brooklyn Borough President’s office found there is progress to be made: Internet access is subpar (the average rating is 3 out of 5) in the district’s schools; there are only enough tablets and laptops for 7 and 20 percent of the borough’s student population, respectively; and 70 percent of schools don’t have an established computer science curriculum.
“The mayor has a very strong goal, but the question is, are we set up to meet this goal based on current investments in schools?” says Stefan Ringel, a spokesperson for Adams. He adds that reaching the 2025 goal will require more investments in infrastructure upgrades as well as in the curriculum.
“There is a lot of talk around getting these students active in STEM education, but I’d say for our program, if we have 12 girls sign up, maybe one has actually been exposed to coding,” says Toussaint, as she watches a group of six teenagers practice a dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
“We’re not trying to make engineers or professional dancers within a week,” says Arielle Snagg, an instructor with STEM From Dance who also has a degree in neuroscience. “But we are hoping to give them an idea on how they can use technology within this art.”
Snagg, originally from Bushwick — another impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood — says she understands the plight of students who live in these parts of New York. Of those who work (and only about half the population does), just 5 percent do so within the tech and science fields. And getting more women into technology can help a labor force that is desperate for diversity, especially when it comes to women of color.
After a week in the camp, Harrison, who will be a senior at Achievement First Brooklyn High School in the fall, says she gained a new appreciation for the integration of dance and science. “And I’ve gotten better in math — I’ve even learned to love it.”
Next spring, Toussaint will see her first group of students graduate from high school. And though she hopes that many of them pursue technology in college, more than anything she wants them to enter any career with confidence.
“The point is to let [these girls] know that they can do anything, and they don’t have to do one thing,” she says. “They just have to open up their minds a bit.”

These Rocket Competitions Could Help Female Aerospace Engineers Take Off

Aerospace engineering is receiving a little extra boost of energy — but we’re not talking about rocket fuel.
Rather, it’s some pink power.
Among the rockets at the Team America Rocketry Challenge outside of Washington, D.C. is a sole pink rocket belonging to one of the few all-girl teams. Typically, the color pink is lacking in the engineering field — but it is the hope of these young girls and the Aerospace Industries Association to change all of that.
Currently, there’s a dearth of women in the engineering field. A 2013 Aviation Week Workplace study found that only 24 percent of aerospace professionals are women. And according to the University of Wisconsin, only 11 percent of practicing engineers are women. And if that’s not enough bad news, 41 percent of women leave the aviation field after 10 years compared to just 10 percent of men, according to a Catalyst report.
What is the reason for this? According to Susan Lavrakas, director of workforce for the Aereospace Industries Association, it is a lack of opportunity for children, especially the ability for girls to become involved at a young age.
Lavrakas and the Association want to reach children at a younger age to expose them to the field and generate interest through participation in STEM programs. The Association spends about $160 million per year on funding programs for children and are currently reworking them to reach a younger demographic. The aim? To target children in elementary school before they have become set on a specific education and career path.
However, there is hope. In 2013, there was a 30 percent increase in women studying engineering — and there’s potential for that number to increase. Case in point: The Texas girls’ team with their pink rocket and a team of Girl Scouts from California represent a new generation of girls interested in engineering and aviation committed to their field.
Sixteen-year-old Kara Chuang is a member of the California team.
“By doing competitions like this, by promoting STEM, it introduces girls into a mainly man-dominant field,” Chuang told National Journal. “We can do just as well as them.”
Although neither of the girls’ teams won, they proved that there is room for a little pink in the engineering world, and, for women in the industry, the sky is certainly not the limit.
MORE: Will Mentorship Bring More Diversity to STEM Fields?

Will Mentorship Bring More Diversity to STEM Fields?

We’ve all heard the statistics. Women, by and large, are disproportionately underrepresented in STEM fields. According to recent research from employment website LinkedIn, women make up just 30 percent of the entire workforce in the tech industry. The statistics in engineering are even worse. Only 15 percent of jobs in this high-paying, highly-competitive field are held by women. It’s a familiar story with no simple solutions.

As Fast Company’s Chris Gayomali points out, “The gender imbalance in STEM fields is a deeply rooted structural problem, from the actual hiring process to the education system responsible for churning out the future’s workforce.” But there are ways to ease the imbalance. And one strategy, experts claim, is through mentorship.

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Last week, MentorNet, an organization that has paired more than 32,000 STEM students with mentors in the field over the past 15 years, announced that it was partnering with LinkedIn in order to expand its reach by utilizing their expansive professional social media platform to connect students — called protégés — with STEM professionals. This partnership allows MentorNet to leverage LinkedIn’s network of more than 277 million professional to find mentors who would be interested in the program. (Additionally, LinkedIn is providing MentorNet with a grant that will allow the organization to update its own technology platform to reach even more people.) Currently, Meg Garlinghouse, Head of LinkedIn Good, wrote in a blog post that the protégés greatly outnumber the mentors.

“LinkedIn is this rich profile for education, employment, and where people are in the world,” Mary Fernandez, MentorNet CEO, told Fast Company. “We can combine that with the data for our program, and once you understand the challenges people are facing, once you have this really rich profile, you can begin to match mentors and protégés algorithmically.”

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But good news is often offset with bad. Research shows that while the number of women in STEM degree programs is increasing — the National Science Board’s recent report found that the number is up 21 percent since 1993 —  the number of degree-holders in these areas has actually declined over the past 30 years, from 23 percent in 1984 to fewer than 15 percent today. For its part, MentorNet’s mission of mentorship has proven to work: 92 percent of the program’s protégés have gone on to graduate, according to Fast Company.

Fernandez herself experienced the positive effects of mentorship when she was hired at AT&T Bell Labs while in graduate school at Princeton University. For her, the experience was invaluable. She even attributes it to helping her earn her Ph.D. Now, her mission is to help other young women find the support they need to be successful, which in turn can positively impact the nation’s economy.

“There’s an economic imperative for more diversity,” she said, noting that hiring managers couldn’t ignore a talent pool full of smart, educated women. “Women have to be part of the story. Latinos have to be part of the story. First-generation college attendees have to be part of the story.” And LinkedIn and MentorNet is rewriting it now.

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