LEGO Education Innovation Studios gets Girl Guides involved

Dublin City University’s LEGO Education Innovation Studio recently teamed up with the Irish Girl Guides as part of an initiative to encourage teenage girls to become more involved with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths. A week long Summer camp was arranged for Girl Guides between the ages of 14 and 18, who visited the LEGO Education Innovation Studio in DCU’s Institute of Education. They got hands on with LEGO Mindstorms, programming robots for set scenarios. Irish Tech News reported on the scheme:

Based around the theme ‘Mission to Mars’ the central focus of the summer camp was to develop computational skills while engaging in fun, hands-on and proactive robotics workshops. The girl guides worked in teams to research space exploration and to solve a series of missions by designing, building and programming their own robot.

It is planned that participants of the programme will work with the younger members of the Irish Girl Guide association to facilitate workshops at their International Camp in Tipperary later this summer. IGGNITE 2017 will host over 1600 young people from all across Ireland and as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Canada, the US and the Republic of Georgia, as well as areas closer to home, e.g. England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

With participation in STEM subjects post-secondary education seeing more male than female students getting involved, this project is part of a push to redress the balance.