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Opening doors with math, science
Published 11/3/2010 in Local News : Education
GEMS event shows importance of math, science in careers.
By JEROME P. CURRY
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Brad Nading/Telegram Jennifer Sandoval connects a section of track while creating a marble roller coaster Tuesday at one of the sessions in a Girls in Engineering, Math and Science Career Fair at St. Dominic Parish Center. Sandoval attends Abe Hubert Middle School.
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Brad Nading/Telegram Patricia Perez-Lopez, left, finds out she can spin on a stool using gravity and momentum Tuesday as she holds a mounted, spinning bicycle tire during a physics session at a Girls in Engineering, Math and Science (GEMS) Career Fair in St. dominic Parish Center. Lopez attends Abe Hubert Middle School. The session was provided by Fort Hays State University physics students.
More than 300 seventh-grade girls Tuesday sat attentively in the lecture rooms at the St. Dominic Parish Center to learn where their interest and talent for engineering, math and science might take them in the years ahead.
They came from Garden City, Dighton, Healy and Holcomb. They found out the sometimes nerdish image of hard science is downright wrong.
Brenda Drees of the Russell Child Development Center led the students in exercises and instructed them in how physical therapy helps them become fit and recover from injuries.
All of the seventh-graders were taking part in the sixth Girls in Engineering, Math and Science (GEMS) Career Fair.
"We try to help them see when they are in the seventh grade that if you take the more difficult classes in high school that they will have more control over their futures," said Linda Holmquist, coordinator of the Career Learning System, an effort funded jointly by Garden City Public Schools and Garden City Community College.
Alex Kanelakos, an instructor and flight controller at the National Aeronautics and Space Agency's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, talked about spacesuits and showed the girls how to try on parts of a real spacesuit.
"There are reasons we take math and science," Holmquist said, "and these students already are learning how important it is."
Veterinarians Eilene Minnix of the Garden City Veterinary Clinic and Calista Miller of the Sourk Vet Clinic helped the students dissect the eye of a steer to demonstrate the intricacies of vision.
Groups of students were divided into morning and afternoon sessions. There absolutely is no other way the number of girls taking part could have worked their way through the 17 instruction stations.
Garden City police officers discussed crime scene investigation from fingerprints and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to small plastic fibers and tire tracks. In a related session, Lora Kilgore-Norquest of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, showed the GEMS how to do DNA extraction.
Another reason for the morning and afternoon sessions was that it allowed the seventh-graders to eat lunch at their own schools. Morning students were returned to their schools before lunch. Afternoon students arrived after lunch.
Chris Standard of the Seward County Fire Department and Larry Pander of Garden City Community College's Fire Science Department made the point that there is more to fire fighting than suppressing flames and helping wayward cats out of trees.
From Kenneth Henderson Middle School in Garden City, there were 142 girls Tuesday; from Garden City's Abe Hubert Middle School, 145; from Holcomb, 43; from Healy, 1. Seven of the girls are home schooled.
"The children are getting information which will enable them to make career choices," Holmquist said. "This is what this is all about."
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