Summary:
Sylvia Acevedo was one of the first Latina executives in Tech. But a lot of young girls aren’t interested in male-dominated STEM programs. How to capture their interest? Save The Elephants!
What’s the secret to getting girls to lean about tech? How about making it matter in human, and animal, terms? Keep reading to discover Sylvia Acevedo’s secret.
One of the biggest changes that's happened recently is in 2018, the Boy Scouts decided to change their name to Scouts BSA and start allowing girls to join their ranks. You adamantly challenged that move. Why?
So you know, we are very focused on what we do. We are the experts in how girls learn and lead. I'm so excited about that because we create all of our programs for girls. We work with children, children 5 to 18. They are in such different stages of their development and so we make sure that our programming is relevant for them. I know that so much of the reason why we have such a STEM gap is the STEM programming has been designed for boys. And so there's like a little bit of, if you think of a bell curve, on the edges are those girls that are interested, kind of like me, but the vast majority of girls learn and appreciate differently.
So I'll give you a great example. One of our partners wanted more girls to do robotics and we have so many great robotics with VEX and FIRST Robotics. In fact, if you see those teams, if you see an all-girls team, it's gonna be a Girl Scouts team, okay? So that's fantastic, but we realize if you look at the bell curve, those are the edges. And so they said how do you get the most girls interested in it because not all girls, they say oh robot, I don't want to do that.
Like my daughter, until she took the camp and enjoyed it.
Yes, but then getting her to be interested is the first step, right? We're experts in girls. So how do you get an older girl to get interested in robotics? Here's what we developed. There's an elephant herd in Africa led by a matriarch elephant. There's baby elephants in that herd. The matriarch gets ensnared in a hunter's trap and loses a limb. Now you have to create a limb or the herd including the matriarch and the baby elephants die. Now go.
Okay, I will tell you girls who are never interested in robotics, didn't care about pounds per square inch and moving motion, nothing like that, they want to save that elephant herd and then they're going to learn how to create a prosthetic arm. And once they do that, then they begin applying it and from that we've had girls that have created robots to change, turn pages for older people or people who have a hard time changing a page. We have girls in Iowa who created prosthetic hands for young kids. That's fantastic, but first you've got to get them interested and if you do it in a way that doesn't interest or engage them? No.
