On Saturday, Nov. 13, Antioch Community High School hosted the third annual Girls in STEM Conference. Gregory Bays, who is the science department chair, was in charge of this event. This conference was open to any middle school in the NLCC, but before the conference happened, Bays mentioned that anyone was welcome to attend.
“If students from McHenry County [come] as well, or students from Wisconsin come, we’re not going to shy any student away from attending,” Bays said.
The reason for creating this event was to get younger students, especially young girls, involved in STEM, which stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math. Bays says that there is a much lower female attendance rate in high school STEM classes. The goal of this conference is to hopefully introduce younger girls to the idea of STEM and get them ready for high school STEM classes.
“The numbers… get worse in terms of male versus female participation,” Bays said
This event offered multiple things for young girls to do. From multiple presentations and tons of hands-on activities, there were many different options for different fields in STEM. They are designed to get girls more involved and interested. One individual in attendance was middle school student Sunil Kumar.
“I’m hoping to get better at building circuits and get better on coding,” Kumar said.
There are a lot of different reasons that one might be interested in an event like this, whether it be to learn more things about a certain topic or to learn about a topic they knew nothing about before that day. Another student, middle schooler Rachel Varghese, was in attendance.
“I thought that [an event like this] would be a really great way for me to learn all types of different sciences and how to look at different things,” Varghese said.
Whether it be building circuits, building a model skyscraper or learning how to code, there was sure to be something that interested everyone.
