On Saturday 9 Oct 2010, UCSC had their 10th annual Expanding Your Horizons conference to interest high-school girls in math and science. (I mentioned it briefly in a previous blog post.) This year they had Danielle Feinberg of Pixar Animation Studios as their keynote speaker: “To Infinity and Beyond! The Math and Science Behind Movie Making.” Most of the day, though was spent on hands-on workshops doing things like extracting chemicals from marine sponges, or doing the DNA manipulations needed for forensic identification of human DNA. The Santa Cruz Sentinel published a decent article on the conference (written by Alia Wilson).
Although only about 200 girls are directly involved in an event like this, I think that hands-on workshops (whether one-day or all summer) are far more likely to produce future scientists and engineers than TV shows (like Nerd Girls) or web sites (like Dot Divas).
I remember one time a number of engineering faculty discussing what outreach events had been most effective in getting them into engineering, and NSF high-school science and math programs came up as being really memorable. I’ve not heard much recently about NSF high-school outreach, are they still doing it? I, myself, went to a weekly abstract-algebra program that lasted for a few months (that would have been around 1970). I still have the copy of Polya’s How To Solve It that I got as part of that program, though the textbook on rings, fields, and ideals has long been gone and forgotten.