Grant Recipient

The Quarter Project of Northern Colorado is a nonprofit that works to increase the number of women and gender non-conforming people in STEM to bridge the gender gap in STEM academics and careers. Women currently make up only 28% of the STEM workforce. We work to help bridge this gap by providing fun, hands-on, after-school STEM programs for elementary, middle school, and high school students. Our classes are only open to girls and gender non-conforming people to create a learning environment that will help boost their confidence and STEM identity.

This year we have expanded our organization from teaching one weekly class and one monthly class to teaching six weekly programs at Boys and Girls Clubs and schools across Larimer County. Our program at Harmony Village Boys & Girls Club is almost 100% Latina. We have at least one bilingual teacher at this location so our GEMS classes are taught in both English and Spanish. We are excited about this opportunity because we have a couple of little girls in this program who do not speak English; also, learning STEM in Spanish normalizes these concepts for these bilingual girls and helps them internalize STEM is also for them! We also are incorporating culturally relevant STEM projects – the girls made piñatas, and, in doing so, learned how to calculate the volume of spheres and cones…it was so cool to see the facilitator’s slides in both Spanish and English. Again, this teaches these girls that math has a purpose and can be lots of fun!

Every year before winter break, we have a six-week-long project in which the girls get to build, decorate, and wire “gingerbread houses.” These houses are built out of plywood, and the girls get to use power tools to put them together! CSU’s Construction Management team was incredible last season in helping us get ready for this project – it is a big one. We had to pre-cut all the wood, which these volunteers helped with; our model this year was 9” x 12″. GEMS girls, with help from Quarter Project staff and Construction Management volunteers, construct these houses – screwing the frame to the walls and floors with power tools, the older girls (with much supervision) used a drill with a circular bit to cut out windows. This year we were lucky enough to have volunteers from Conduct All Electric come in to teach them about circuitry and ‘wire’ Christmas tree lights to a battery pack and hang on the outside of the houses. At the end of this project, every girl in our program had a fun gingerbread house decoration fully decorated and lit up to take home! During this program, a third grader who has been involved with GEMS for a year and a half completed her house without assistance and very quickly. Her little friend sitting next to her looked at her and exclaimed, “You are a FULL engineer!”

We are wrapping up our 2022-2023 school year with fun classes on engineering design, plant biology, and working to incorporate a small lesson each week on increasing our girls’ self-concepts and self-esteem. In addition to the fun classes we have been teaching all year, we also offer 30 scholarships to GEMS participants in the STEM-X Institute Summer Camp. This is a week-long STEM camp where they can do things such as pyrotechnics, rocketry, flight simulators, and many other fun things! We’ll again be offering our week-long Girls Empowerment Camps this summer – working on increasing positive self-perception – integral for these girls to create a STEM identity and embodiment. At a GEMS class this week, one of our GEMS created a shirt that said, “A girl best engineer is right here!” This example, along with the ‘FULL engineer’ story above, are the highlights of our program – this is what we are working for, girls that know and feel they are completely capable and able to be part of STEM.