The road trip and Merge Cube donations are wrapping up but Eduporium’s Andy made his eighth stop on Wednesday afternoon. His last stop was New York City, giving the road trippers the chance to see the Big Apple once again. While there, he traveled across the river into Jersey City, NJ to meet with Michelle Velho, who applied for our technology grant for teachers back in June and works as a coding teacher at the Hudson Montessori School. Michelle helps run a Girls Who Code club and has brought additional STEM opportunities to her students.
When she applied for our grant, Michelle indicated how she wanted to help tighten the gender gap in STEM by introducing girls to beneficial coding experiences from a young age. Since we certainly understand the discussion around getting more women into STEM we were definitely excited to hear that! She also wants to do her part to help more students go on to study computer science. Knowing the importance of coding skills and the connections to lucrative careers, Michelle has certainly helped enhance her students' futures.
After first teaching coding five years ago, Michelle started an afterschool program for girls to gain more coding experience. She saw how students were enthralled by programming and loved creating animations, stories, and games as well as programming robots. She also noticed that not many girls came back to the program from year to year and the gender ratio continued to shift, prompting her to focus on keeping more girls involved. Michelle started with two clubs and the response was great. The girls have explored Scratch, the micro:bit V2, the Ozobot Evo, and more—even inviting girls from other neighborhoods to join them.
Michelle has helped many girls learn about and try coding and computer science through her initiatives and commitment. As we would agree, she finds the importance of learning how to code to be a priority for today’s students. Her ultimate goal with her afterschool club is to continue to narrow the gender gap in STEM and this starts with getting girls excited about technology and its applications from an early age. So, we hope the Merge Cube donation helps them engage more girls with technology and get them excited. From there, perhaps they’ll become more interested in augmented reality and explore more about that, including how to create it!
In her grant application, Michelle said she didn’t like sitting around and watching gender inequality continue to perforate STEM education. So, she decided to do something about it. Her contributions to these students, especially female students, are already substantial and we're excited to contribute to some further success. We thank Michelle for welcoming us and, as always, thank the Merge VR team for their generous Merge Cube donations. To learn more about this initiative, we encourage you to read about some of the other school visits.