Girl Scouts participate in science camp

Instead of s’mores and tents, a camp held last week at the University of Missouri-Kansas City offered Kansas City Girl Scouts science and technology-based fun.

About 60 local Girl Scouts of middle school and high school age attended “Inventure University Science and Engineering Camp.”

The camp is offered in the summer through a partnership with Girl Scouts and the UMKC School of Computing and Engineering, 5100 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, Mo.

Throughout the week of camp, girls saw hands-on demonstrations about electricity. They created bridges out of popsicles sticks and made balloon-propelled cars.

This is the third year for the camp at UMKC and it has become a can’t-miss event of the summer for some Scouts, including Lauren Atkeisson, an eighth-grader from Overland Park.

Lauren plans a career in science and attended the camp for a second time this summer.

“I thought I would learn more,” Lauren said. “That way if I am in school I will already have a basic knowledge. There are so many different subjects under (science and engineering).”

The program began at UMKC four years ago with the idea to bring young people to campus for a computer and engineering experience. Girl Scouts of Northeast Kansas and Northwest Missouri then partnered to form the camp.

It is part of the Girl Scouts organization’s efforts to expose more girls to science, technology, engineering and math fields, said camp coordinator Alexis Denny.

“We are just trying to give girls a look at something new,” Denny said. “It opens their eyes to new possibilities and things they never realized they could do.”

At the UMKC campus, women make up about 25 percent of students in the school of computing and engineering, said Dean Kevin Truman.

 The college has the goal of making that 30 percent to 40 percent in the coming years, he said.

“To do that, we need to encourage women there are good careers in science and math,” Truman said. “Even if they don’t know how it plays into their daily lives, everything is engineered. We talk to them about how many of the products that make people’s lives better are products produced by engineers.”

The girls also gain experience living on a college campus, Denny said. They stay in dorms and interact with seven professors who provide labs and demonstrations. UMKC faculty members helped teach during the camp.

“It doesn’t matter if you are hiking through the woods or working with robots,” Denny said. “Residential camp is about gaining skills in independence. Here they have an opportunity to go away from home and learn to take care of themselves.”

And they interact with college students who are studying in related fields.

Katie Rabovsky, a college student at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, acted as a camp counselor. As a biomedical engineering student, she has often been in the minority as a female, she said.

“Here the girls can be focused on learning,” Rabovsky said. “They are a lot less worried about how they look with it all being girls and more interested in asking questions and more open to answering questions.”

Jessica Brummel, an eighth-grader from Louisburg, Kan., said she had fun learning about engineering through hands-on projects.

One of her favorites was inventing a structure to protect an egg when they dropped it from a high point to the ground, she said.  

“I just like that you are trying new things because it makes you think,” Jessica said.

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