Red Bank Regional Seeks Female STEM Students

LITTLE SILVER, NJ - As the need becomes more acute for students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, Red Bank Regional High School hopes to attract more female students to even things out among their male counterparts.

Recent statistics find that while women are entering medicine and sometimes math, their numbers in college are significantly underrepresented in computer technology and engineering.

“…Data tells me that we don’t really have a STEM gender gap in the U.S.: we have an (Engineering & Technology) ET gender gap," wrote Randy Olson, senior data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

This ET gender gap is not without its consequences. Computer Science and Engineering majors have stagnated at less than 10% of all degrees conferred to women in the U.S. for the past decade while the demand for employees with programming and engineering skills continue to outpace the supply every year.”

Red Bank Regional High School operates a state-certified academy program in both Information Technology and Engineering, open to any qualified Monmouth County student. The academy also has developed a specialty in Cybersecurity yielding many regional, state and national accolades.
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However, the school is no different when it comes to gender composition in the academy. Currently, only 23% of females attend the Academy of Engineering out of 92 students while only 15% of females make up the whole academy population of 102 students.

Several years ago, academy teachers Mandy Galante and Jeremy Milonas made an appeal to the four Red Bank Regional sending schools (Red Bank Primary and Charter, Little Silver and Shrewsbury) and were able to field a team to enter the national CyberPatriot competition.

Two teams from Markham Place School in Little Silver won the first and third place slots in the Middle School division. One team was comprised of girls and boys; a second was an all-girls team.

This year, with the aid of a grant from the Red Bank Regional BUC Backer Foundation, Alison Murphy, Math/Academy teacher and Milonas set-up a program “Girls Who Code” to entice young girls to consider the engineering and/or computer fields before they arrive in high school.

The program began in October and continues to May with monthly meetings that run from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. These middle school girls are divided into smaller groups and work with one or two RBR high school students who guide them through the exercises under the direction of Murphy and Milonas. The teachers, as their students, volunteer their time. Expenses including the cost of coding robots, t-shirts, certificates and dinner are funded from the BUC Backer grant.

More than 30 students continue to attend each session, officials said.

“We thought that getting them to experience STEM at an earlier age and with their friends would encourage more to go into these fields," Murphy said. "It also helps out our own students who gain community service hours for the National Technical Honor Society.”

Murphy describes the code work in which the girls are engaged, as a variety of languages, mostly block languages. These include Scratch and Blockly. The work is inherently fun with the use of Lego robots and Ozobots, she said. They also are creating different applications through App Inventor.

"The girls will also be learning a little bit of binary language and how a computer works," Murphy said. "We may introduce them to HTML, Python or Java, depending on how the sessions go. The main focus is to generate interest in computer science and enlighten them on the possibilities and opportunities that computer science can provide.”

According to Code.org, just in New Jersey, there are 22,365 open computing jobs and only 1,111 computer science graduates. Therefore, many open and well-paying jobs are going unfilled, according to Red Bank Regional.

Engineering/Math teacher Ashley Studd invited the girls to her classroom where the 3-D printer was busy turning out animal shaped cookie cutters. The students were mesmerized by the machine and passed around the finished product.

Studd explained that her students conducted a poll of the district’s Little Buc preschoolers to learn what their favorite animals were. The engineering students then designed the prototypes that the girls were examining.

Student Volunteer Corine Normandin of Brielle observed, “I volunteered because I wanted to get more kids involved. I feel it is a career field that needs a lot of girls, and this is a great way to do it. I think the program is going very well as they are having fun, are engaged and are getting the idea that this is very interesting and it is getting them excited about coding.”

Red Bank Boro Middle School Project Lead the Way Teacher Eric Swartz accompanied his students to the girls' coding program. He brought along 11 girls but said more than 30 that wanted to take part. He selected the Red Bank Boro Middle School participants based on grade level and math scores.

“The girls are super excited," he said. "They love the projects they are working on. They are all fired up about it. It pairs very nicely with what I am doing in my classroom. This really gives them hands-on experience for the future. This is a great opportunity for them and they are seizing the moment.”

“This program is in a new form from what I learned in the past," said eighth-grade student Jennifer Hernandez, "It is really fun and I am planning on doing either technology or engineering in high school next year. Before this, I was thinking of another academy but after doing this program I feel more connected to RBR.'

The program will be evaluated throughout the year based on the accomplishments the students achieve in programming through their activities, and, ultimately, on how many new female students the program attracts to the technical academies at RBR over the next few years.

Red Bank Regional is trying to attract female students to the STEM subjects. Image via Shutterstock.