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After winning a national student competition that gave them a chance to design a project for NASA, Amador Valley High School’s all-girl STEM club has been working hard to make one clear statement: If they can do it, so can any other young girl interested in science.
Even if the science, technology, engineering and math workforces are, and have always been, typically dominated by men.
“When we went into this proposal we didn’t have much knowledge on the design process, or how it works … but through research and teamwork, and just setting little tasks little by little, we eventually did it,” Helen Hoang, an Amador junior and president of the Amador Valley STEP UP Club, told the Weekly. “So if you have anything that you’re interested in — especially engineering, physics, STEM — just go ahead and try and pursue it because your hard work and determination will take you far.”
Part of the STEP UP 4 Women initiative, which stands for “Supporting Teachers to Encourage the Pursuit of Undergraduate Physics for Women”, the club at Amador is led by physics teacher Bree Barnett Dreyfuss.
She said STEP UP is a national program that develops lessons for teachers that help them talk to their students about considering physics as a major. Dreyfuss brought up one of those lesson plans in a class about four years ago and a student got interested and decided she wanted to create an inclusive and safe space for young women who wanted to study physics.
That’s when the STEP UP Club started.
“What brought me to joining this club is that I really wanted to join a big community of other girls in STEM and help promote girls in STEM,” Hoang said.
According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, even though the number of women who joined the STEM workforce grew at a faster rate compared to men from 2011 to 2021, men still make up the majority of the workforce.
“In 2021, about two-thirds (65%) of those employed in STEM occupations were men and about one-third (35%) were women,” according to the center.
Dreyfuss said that could be because of a massive drop off of women who continue pursuing those careers during college.
“If you look at the statistics, on average for physics programs at the high school level about 40% to 45% of physics classes overall are female,” she said. “But if you look at undergraduates for physics majors … only 20% of undergraduate physics majors are female.”
Dreyfuss said that she has seen girls drop engineering classes because they walked in and didn’t see anyone who looked like her. She added that some girls in those classes will even drop the subject after getting a B, compared to boys who won’t drop those courses until they get a C.
She also said she sees high school girls in physics and engineering classes, but not really in any STEM-related clubs and because there aren’t many girls in those clubs, it could be off-putting for those young women who want to pursue those careers but don’t have any spaces to further their interest. But the STEP UP Club, in contrast, offers exactly that type of space.
“The threshold … is different for males or females or other marginalized groups,” Dreyfuss said. “So it is important to make sure that they feel supported.”
After winning this most recent NASA design competition, Dreyfuss said she hopes it gives these girls and future young women the confidence to take those tougher classes and realize that they do have a space in these fields, which was one of the main reasons the club officers wanted to try out for the competition in the first place.
“They’re really motivated in helping their members try and grow in their STEM interest and doing more and really supporting them in everything else that they can do that are oriented to STEM that they may not feel like they can do,” she said. “Imposter syndrome and this feeling of it’s very difficult to do hard things in science and stereotype threat is a big deal.”
But the NASA design challenge was no easy task. So much so that some of the club members didn’t even think they were going to win and didn’t know what to expect as they were called into the principal’s office the day they learned of their victory.
“At first we thought we were in trouble because the principal called us over to his office,” Evelyn Sun, a club member, told the Weekly. “We honestly didn’t think we were gonna win, so we were really surprised and honestly just really excited when we won.”
The competition they won was the yearly TechRise STEM challenge, which is geared toward offering sixth to 12th graders the opportunity to design and test their own solutions for space exploration and the study of the earth.
“Cultivating creativity and curiosity and inspiring students to pursue STEM careers is one of NASA’s most important missions,” Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, said in a TechRise press release. “TechRise is a unique opportunity that allows students to gain hands-on knowledge while developing real payloads for flight, and it’s an experience they can carry with them during their educational and early career journeys.”
This year’s TechRise challenge was to design an experiment that could be tested on either a NASA-sponsored high-altitude balloon flight or on a rocket-powered lander. The Amador club chose the rocket-powered lander because of the impact their project — titled “Lunar Scout Technology – An LTV Companion” — would have on their club and the world.
“We’re an all-girls team so it’s really nice to represent women in STEM and future engineers. And we also feel like … the applications of this project, such as being able to find ideal locations for lunar landings, is quite useful,” Hoang said.
The idea behind their project was to collect data using cameras and use that data to map the lunar surface and detect certain objects using machine learning. Their plan is to use technology to sense altitude by using light in order to explore the simulated lunar surface and gather the data they need so that they can come back in the fall and analyze that data.
“With this data, we could run the machine learning model, make a terrain map, chart a course for a rover,” Sowmya Venkatesh, a junior and vice president of outreach for the club, told the Weekly. “It’s like thinking about when humans explore the moon; what kind of information we would need about the lunar surface and trying to gather that information from this simulated one and run the kind of algorithms we use.”
After their proposal won the TechRise competition, the club has been receiving modules created by NASA mentors that they use a support for designing their project and have weekly check-ins with those mentors who provide feedback and walk them through whatever they need to do in order to get their design up and running in time for the suborbital flight test scheduled for this summer.
For Dreyfuss, having those mentors and this experience overall isn’t just a way to get these young girls accustomed to things like internships or supporting them in ways that show they too can get into higher education institutions for these careers. Those mentors also show them that they too are represented in these STEM fields and will hopefully give them the affirmation they need to continue their journeys into these careers.
“A lot of the staff that are doing this, they are coming from a diverse background … they’re making sure that they’re giving back to teens that didn’t have opportunities,” Dreyfuss said. “I’m hoping that it’s going to give them a leg up in applying to some of those summer internship programs … and some of those colleges that may have been a little bit more difficult to get into and just try and level the playing field a little more for them against some others that had a little bit more privilege.”