Grade School STEM at Villa Maria Academy

Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields; but Villa Maria Academy is committed to nurturing and empowering girls to become the female leaders of tomorrow. Although Villa has a strong focus on STEM in the middle school grades curriculum, attention has been increasing in focus on the younger grade as well.

Earlier this year, Villa hosted a school-wide Hour of Code day, where even the First Graders of Villa Maria participated by working in a coding app on their iPads called Daisy the Dinosaur, available in the Apple Store, and they were encouraged to continue to play around with coding at home. The app has an easy drag and drop interface that animates Daisy to dance across the screen. It helps students to understand the basics of objects, sequencing, loops and events by solving this app’s challenges. Students also had the ability through the app to download a kit to learn how to program their own computer game.

The girls also learned the basics of how to use Microsoft PowerPoint this year. As part of this project they learned how to create a slide, how to write text, and how to create, size and manipulate shapes. They each created a snowman slide, and put them all together to form a snowman parade!

Engineering concepts have also been introduced through their Community Unit Lesson. The girls were asked to create structures out of spaghetti and marshmallows to form buildings for their Community.

Most recently, the 1st Grade girls worked on a Physical Science Unit, observing solids, liquids and gases. They learned all about matter and how scientists observe, compare, and contrast different materials. The 1st Graders experimented using balloons and blocks, filling the balloons with gas and measuring the circumference of each balloon. They then took the balloons outside to measure how the cold air affected the balloon and took its circumference again. With the blocks, they experimented to see how sound traveled through solids.

The earlier girls can be introduced to these topics, the sooner we can instill more of an interest in math, science, and engineering, fields in which women are highly underrepresented. Villa is making it a priority to nurture this talent and encourage it in all of its students.