march 2009 issue
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Backpack Brigade Invades U of A For Choices Conference
By BRIAN MURPHY
It’s over for another year. The backpack-laden army of school girls who annually descend on University of Alberta laboratories for an eye-opening look at science opportunities left the campus Wednesday afternoon, happy and motivated.
For 19 years, women in science at the U of A have been volunteer hosts for two-day science camps. The program is called Choices and that’s exactly what the organizers, the Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science and Technology organization, offer Grade 6 girls from the Edmonton area.
WISEST vice-chair Gail Powley, P.Eng., says Choices has learned to adapt to pop-culture science such as robotics and even TV-inspired crime scene investigations. But she says that after putting some 10,000 students through the program, WISEST knows old standby experiments still work. “Chemistry with Bunsen burners and colourful flames always gets their attention,” she said.
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BUNSEN BURNERS AND MORE |
What got the attention of Grade 6 student Alysia Zvonkovic is that Choices is science for girls. Alysia doesn’t see a lot of that.
“When I watch Discovery [channel] and other engineering and science shows, it’s mainly boy scientists, so it would be nice to see some girls,” she said. But after meeting Dr. Margaret-Anne Armour, U of A’s associate dean of diversity in science, Alysia knows there are impressive role models out there in the science world.
The 600 girls who attended this year’s event wrote essays to convince their teachers they should be among the four students each invited school can send. Jennifer Allen was one of the four from St. Vincent Elementary School in Edmonton. She figures she was chosen because one day she wants to design rockets for NASA. She wasn’t sure if she’d get any rocket experience on a visit to the U of A, but she says she came close.
“We put dry ice in a plastic film canister, flipped it over and five seconds later it blasted off to the ceiling,” she said.
Jennifer’s teacher, Angela Whelan, says that’s why Choices works. “Their eyes just go wide with every experiment and the whole experience of seeing that they can do this.”
Article and photo reprinted with permission from the University of Alberta Express News.
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