Robotics STEM Camp for African Girls

WAAW Foundation organizes a high quality, exciting and technically challenging one week residential Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) camp for African Girls in Senior Secondary School (9th to 12th Grades). The camp will be held in Lagos, Nigeria in August 2013.

The objective of the camp is to interest and encourage secondary school girls to participate in STEM fields, at an early age when career decisions are often formed. The learning objective is to ensure girls think of Science and Technology as tools to help them innovate to enable real problem solving in their communities.

The theme of the camp is ROBOTICS AND RENEWABLE ENERGY. The camp uses an integrated learning approach centered around the theme to show how robotics and programming is useful for solving significant problems in Africa, such as trash sorting and recycling; as well as topics in renewable energy for electricity generation. The camp includes hands on activities, lectures, tutorials, experiments and field trips, led and presented by female role models, as an avenue to engage girls and interest them in STEM careers.

Participants are African girls (ages 13 – 17) who show high aptitude and interest in STEM disciplines, drawn both from government or public schools fed by low income families, who otherwise would not have the opportunity to learn about or be exposed to possible STEM careers, and from private schools. The aim of the camp is to challenge traditional African societal beliefs that female education is wasted resources, and demonstrate that STEM innovation helps solve real problems in the communities in which our participants live.

Goals and Objectives (Bold)
The goal of the camp is to interest and encourage female African students to participate in STEM fields, at an early age when career decisions are often formed. The camp will provide an engaging, safe, and fun forum for participants to network, be inspired by role models, and motivated by hands on experiments in robotics and renewable energy.

The long term benefit is female empowerment through increased students’ awareness, participation and recruitment into STEM careers and majors. This in turn builds technology skills capacity in Africa, which ultimately leads to poverty alleviation.

This STEM camp will:

  • Teach critical thinking and problem solving skills inherent in computer science, environmental sciences, mathematics and engineering design, development and testing via lessons and hands on experiments.
  • Expose participants to Robotics and Programming tools and resources that can enhance innovation and problem solving.
  • Teach crucial skills of online research and data gathering and evaluation.
  • Provide opportunities to think about, research, design, build and test renewable energy sources for their local environment.
  • Organize a field trip to a University campus to demonstrate science and technology in action, and to whet students’ appetites to pursue post secondary degrees.
  • Expose participants to successful professional STEM female role models.
  • Integrate fun inquiry-based learning.
  • Provide fun cultural and extracurricular activities aimed at building strong friendships and peer networks among participants.
  • Provide the girls with the opportunity to build and improve research and scientific/public presentations skills by presenting and discussing their projects before judges consisting of STEM professors, graduate students and professionals.
  • Provide girls with career counseling opportunities in STEM and exposure to role models.
  • Encourage parent participation for continued support of girls education after camp experience.
  • Provide an online forum for continued sharing of ideas and experiences related to the successful navigation of STEM careers in Africa.
  • Provide girls the opportunity to form peer support networks.

To get involved, please contact us directly at [email protected].

visit the WAAW Foundation website for more information

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