Girls' Geek Day

Girls' Geek Days are all about sparking elementary school-aged girls' interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) by providing a fun, collaborative, hands-on environment to learn new skills and helping them connect to other STEM programs in the community. Participants will have the option to choose 3 different hands-on STEM activity sessions to join throughout the morning.

Be sure to save the dates for 2024/25 Girls' Geek Days! Registration will become available a month before each event.

• Register: March 15

Get a behind-the-scenes look at Girls' Geek Day in this Computer Science Careers Across Virginia video about Data Science.

The final Girls' Geek Day of the school year is always bittersweet as we say goodbye to our 5th grade participants and our high school senior volunteers. We are especially going to miss Ava Paul, our high school volunteer organizer who recruited and organized dozens of high school volunteers for Girls' Geek Day. We heard so many wonderful comments about how kind and enthusiastic our high school volunteers were this year as they facilitated sessions and were awesome role models for the participants! This Saturday we also had several new stations including a parachute drop, card making with LEDs, building challenges with Strawbees and slime making.

CBS19 stopped by to highlight our awesome high school student volunteers! The high school students ran a majority of the sessions including OctoStudio, robot petting zoos, marble-powered computers, building challenges, binary bracelets, plus an Albemarle High School robotics team brought their competition robot.

This past Saturday you could find girls engaged in robotics, coding games, building challenges, creating binary bracelets, and exploring the international space station in VR. We are so grateful to Center 1 with Albemarle County Public Schools for hosting Girls' Geek Day and all the volunteers who came out to lead sessions and be amazing role models for our participants.

New this session was Building Muscles to Understand Biomechanics from the UVA Chapter of the American Society of Biomechanics, Block-based Coding, and Coding Creations with Robots. We also bid a fond farewell to our fantastic high school co-organizers Anna and Maggi as they go off to their next adventure in college.

More sessions, more girls, more volunteers, more amazing opportunities to learn and explore STEM! We had 9 sessions, including Ready, Set, Robots! with Sarah from Birdbrain Technologies, Augmented and Virtual Reality with Mariah and Sophia from NRAO, Coding Music with Python with Anooshka from DebuggingOut, Virtual Escape Room with Jessa from Albemarle County Public Schools, plus the amazing high school volunteers running sessions on robotics, building boats, claymation, and building challenges!

We were so excited to bring Girls' Geek Day back on December 10th with Center 1 as our host! Girls' Geek Days are all about sparking elementary school aged girls interest in STEM. We had so many amazing volunteers who did just that including a group from GA-CCRi who developed and led a great hands-on activity - Using LEGO to understand APIs. In addition to these professional role models, we had so many high school students volunteer their time and lead amazing sessions on coding, robotics, and animation! The future is indeed looking bright and we are so fortunate to be part of a community that recognizes the importance of addressing the gender gap in STEM and supports our K-12 outreach efforts in so many ways!

• High School Students volunteer at Girls Geek Day to involve more women in STEM (January 2024, CBS19)
• Center 1 hosts Girls' Geek Day (February 2023, NBC29)

• Girls' Geek Day inspires girls to explore STEM (February 2020, CBS19)
  
• Girls' Geek Day held at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School (January 2020, CBS19)
• Girls' Geek Day inspires girls to explore STEM (February 2020, CBS19)
  
• Girls' Geek Day held at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School (January 2020, CBS19)
• School Hosts Event to Encourage Young Girls' Interest in 'STEM' Subjects (NBC29, February 2016)
• NOT Grandpa's Science Class: Girls Geek Day (WMRA, November 2015)
• Girls’ Geek Day with Paula White (WTJU, February 2015)

A very special thanks to all our Girls’ Geek Day volunteers!!! At Girls' Geek Day, volunteers lead a variety of hands-on activities, including things like:

• Robotics with Bee-Bot, botley, Code and Go Robot Mouse, Finches, Hummingbird Robotics, Marty, Ozobot Evo and Sphero Bolts

• Electronic with Makey Makey and Micro:bits

• Design challenges with Keva Plank Challenges, Strawbees Challenges, Sticks and Balls
• Coding with Scratch, Python, EarSketch, Blockly
  
• Unplugged activities including LED cards, Binary Bracelets,

Girls’ Geek Days are not possible without our volunteers. Please encourage colleagues, parents, MS & HS girls to consider becoming a volunteer. No previous experience is required - you can learn right along with the girls.

The first Girls' Geek Day was held in March, 2013 and was the the brainchild of Paula White, retired Gifted Resource Teacher at Albemarle County Schools. She and Kim Wilkens, Tech-Girls founder, continued to expand the program with the support and effort of many volunteers who generously offer their time and talents to get girls fun & early exposure to STEM fields. The program is now hosted at Center 1 with organizer Katie Breaud, Learning Technology Integrator in Albemarle County Schools.