GiST Volunteer opportunity:

This month I was very pleased to be able to get my first opportunity to volunteer and help out. I was a group leader at GiST which stands for Girls in STEM at Tulane. STEM is an acronym for the subjects within this program and stood for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This is a program designed to empower middle school girls to pursue careers in these fields and foster their passion for these subjects in the process. The program was held on October 29th at the Boggs building just off of Freret street.

GiST initially started with a science scavenger hunt where we led small groups of girls to classrooms where different types of scientific stations were set up. There were informative presentations or more hands on exhibitions set up in each of the classrooms. The two stations that were clear favorites amongst my group were the NASA and the robotic vehicle stations. The robotic vehicle was very interactive because the girls were allowed to drive it around. They even had a camera attached to the vehicle to show the POV as if you were shrunk down in size and a driver of the vehicle. The NASA exhibit was great because it had a nice mix of information regarding the program and halloween treats for answering questions correctly. The NASA experience finished by letting the girls know about a project coming up to send an ethnically and gender diverse group of people to space in the near future. I thought this ending was the epitome of what this program was all about. It gave tangible examples of role models these girls can relate to that will be breaking new ground in this field of science.

Once the scavenger hunt was over, we divided up into our main groups based on our wristbands. My group was the "checkered" group because we had a black and white checkered wrist bands. We attended three more group activities which included a "chem-ystery", anatomy in virtual reality, and math. The chemistry room involved guessing how colors of indicators changed based on whether household liquids were acidic or basic. In the virtual reality anatomy room, the girls could put on a VR headset and gloves to view and adjust 3D images inside the human body. The picture included in this blog was myself as a 6th grader was testing out virtual reality learning. We finished up the individual group activities in the math room where we played games with beads. These games incorporated pattern recognition based on multiples of 3 or 4 in order to win and grab the last beads in the game.

Finally and certainly not least, we worked as a team to build a parachute for a small plastic toy pig who we named "Wilbur". Our group was competing against the other groups to see which parachute took the longest time to hit the ground and that one would be declared the winner. Although we did not end up winning, I was very proud of how our group worked together and produced a solid parachute as a team. At the end, the group was very sweet and grateful for the opportunity at GiST which made the whole experience very fulfilling and worthwhile. They certainly had a good time at GiST and will remember this as a positive influence on their academics and future careers which is what it is all about. This much was very apparent as I was flooded with sweet "bye Mr Teddy"s as it came for their turns to leave with their schools. 

The experience was a great first volunteering opportunity this semester and I cannot wait to get involved and write about the next one!

 October hours: 8 hours 

Total hours: 8 hours