Personal interactions are important drivers of STEM identity in girls — ScienceDaily
As head of the educational outreach arm of the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Roxanne Hughes has overseen dozens of science camps over the years, including numerous sessions of the successful SciGirls Summer Camp she co-organizes with WFSU .
In a new paper published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Hughes and her colleagues took a much closer look at one of those camps, a coding camp for middle school girls.
They found that nuanced interactions between teachers and campers as well as among the girls themselves impacted how girls viewed themselves as coders.
The MagLab offers both co-ed camps and summer camps for girls about science in general as well as about coding in particular . Hughes, director of the MagLab’s Center for Integrating Research and Learning , wanted to study the coding camp because computer science is the only STEM field where