Lucy Enos Memorial Scholarship for Teachers open for applications

The Lucy Enos Memorial Scholarship is for teachers of Hawaiian or part Hawaiian descent, or who teach children of Hawaiian ancestry. The scholarship provides a unique opportunity for the selected teacher to travel to Colorado Springs, Colo., to participate in one of the Space Foundation’s summer Space Across the Curriculum courses.

The scholarship provides a $3,000 spending allowance for travel, meals and lodging expenses and full tuition and fees for the selected teacher to attend any one of the week-long summer courses.

The recipient may elect to receive continuing education or graduate academic credit for the course; graduate credit may be applied toward one of several master’s degrees offered by Space Foundation partner universities.

Apply by submitting a letter, not exceeding two pages, detailing the motivation for applying, interest in space themes in the classroom, what you hope to gain from the experience and how the knowledge gained will be applied in the classroom. The application letter must be endorsed with a letter of support by a principal or other supervisor, and received by Monday, March 2, 2015.

Please submit your letter via email to: Donations@SpaceFoundation.org

Or via mail to:
 Scholarships
, Space Foundation, 
4425 Arrowswest Dr.
, Colorado Springs, CO  80907

Scholarship Honors Space Foundation CEO’s Grandmother

Established in 2005 to create special professional development opportunities for teachers of Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian ancestry or teachers working with students of Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian ancestry and funded by Space Foundation Chief Executive Officer Elliot Holokauahi Pulham and his wife, Cynthia A. Pulham, the scholarship honors the memory of Pulham’s grandmother, Lucy Enos, who was born in Pahala, Hawai’i, in 1898.

2014 Recipient

Cristina Veresan, a middle school science teacher at Star of the Sea School in Honolulu, Hawai’i, is the 2014 recipient. Veresan plans to use the scholarship to travel to Colorado Springs, Colo., this summer to attend the Space Foundation Space Across the Curriculum teacher professional development course “Astronomy Principles for the Classroom: Kinesthetic Astronomy.” Read more here.

How to get girls more interested in STEM subjects

Eighth graders from Kelly Miller Middle School, Donte Batts, 14, left, and Endia West, 13, do a thin layer chromatography lab on June 2, 2014. Students from Deal Middle and Kelly Miller Middle had their first face to face forensic science lab at Deal Middle School in Washington, DC. The students at both schools did a weekly after-school course for six weeks, and have been Skyping together to share what they learn in each class. (Photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

By Annie Murphy Paul.  Source: The Washington Post  ::

Why are girls underrepresented in STEM classes and careers? What can be done about it? Author Annie Murphy Paul discusses that in this post. She is a contributing writer for Time magazine, writes a weekly column about learning for Time.com, blogs about learning for a number of websites and contributes to various publications.

Eighth graders from Kelly Miller Middle School, Donte Batts, 14, left, and Endia West, 13, do a thin layer chromatography lab on June 2, 2014. Students from Deal Middle and Kelly Miller Middle had their first face to face forensic science lab at Deal Middle School in Washington, DC. The students at both schools did a weekly after-school course for six weeks, and have been Skyping together to share what they learn in each class. (Photo by Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

To hear some ed tech enthusiasts tell it, online learning is sweeping aside the barriers that have in the past prevented access to education. But such pronouncements are premature. As it turns out, students often carry these barriers right along with them, from the real world into the virtual one.

Female students, for example, are poorly represented in science, technology, engineering, and math courses offered online, just as they are scarce in STEM classes conducted in physical classrooms. Demographic analyses of the students enrolled in much-hyped “massive open online courses” show the depth of the gender gap. “Circuits and Electronics,” the first MOOC developed by the online consortium of universities known as edX, had a student body that was 12 percent female, according to a study published in 2013. Another analysis, posted on the Coursera blog earlier this year, found that female enrollment in the company’s courses was lowest—around 20 percent—in subjects like computer science, engineering, and mathematics.

These dismally low numbers provide a reminder that “access” to education is more complicated than simply throwing open the digital doors to whoever wants to sign up. So how can we turn the mere availability of online instruction in STEM into true access for female students?

One potential solution to this information-age problem comes from an old-fashioned source: single-sex education. The Online School for Girls, founded in 2009, provides an all-female e-learning experience. (A companion institution, the Online School for Boys, is opening this fall.) It appears to be doing an especially good job of educating girls in STEM: Last year, 21 of its approximately 1,000 students were recognized by the National Center for Women in Technology “for their aspirations and achievements in computing and technology.” And over the course of the 2013-2014 academic year, the Online School for Girls prepared 30 female students to take the Advanced Placement exam in computer science. To put that number in perspective: 25 American states each prepared fewer than 30 girls to take the AP computer science exam.

It’s hard to argue with these results. But it is possible to quibble with the way the school frames its mission. “Guided by current research on girls’ learning,” the school’s website declares, the school emphasizes “connection among participants” and incorporates “collaboration into the learning experience.” But evidence is weak that there is such a thing as “girls’ learning,” online or offline, if what is meant by that is that each gender has cognitive differences that should be accommodated by different instructional methods. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot has argued persuasively that, while small inherent differences in aptitude between males and females do exist (even as infants, for example, boys seem to have an edge in spatial cognition), society takes these small differences and makes them much bigger—by supporting boys in math and science, and by discouraging girls who study these subjects.

Such overt biases should have no place in online education—but we should also strive to avoid importing subtler misconceptions about “girls’ learning” being different from “boys’ learning.” We need, instead, to address the psychological sense of belonging that female students so often lack when they enter STEM environments.

Studies carried out in physical classrooms demonstrate that these environments are enormously influential. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for example, University of Washington assistant professor Sapna Cheryan and her coauthors exposed a group of female college students to a computer science classroom appointed in stereotypically male-geek fashion: video games and junk food strewn about, Star Trek poster on the wall. Another group of female undergraduates was invited into a computer science classroom that looked quite different: bowls of healthy snacks, a nature poster, an open phone book. Altering these environmental cues, Cheryan notes, “was sufficient to boost female undergraduates’ interest in computer science to the level of their male peers.”

These same dynamics play out online, as Cheryan demonstrated in a subsequent study. Changing the design of a virtual classroom—from one that conveyed computer science stereotypes to one that did not —“significantly increased women’s interest and anticipated success in computer science,” Cheryan and her colleagues reported.

In an experiment now underway at Stanford University, researchers Brian Perone and Michelle Friend are using a virtual reality classroom, complete with virtual “classmates,” to investigate the effect of student gender ratio on young women’s ability to absorb and remember computer science course material, as well as their interest in taking more classes in the subject. Preliminary results suggest that female students learn better when they are surrounded by female classmates —even virtual ones—and the more women in the room, the better. Perone’s and Friend’s findings suggest that the reason behind the success of the Online School for Girls may not be its stated emphasis on teaching girls differently, but simply the fact that its students know that their classmates are girls like them.

Another way to promote female students’ sense of belonging in online math and science courses would be putting more women at the head of virtual classrooms. (As professors Lisa L. Martin and Barbara F. Walter noted in a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, MOOCs are overwhelmingly taught by men.) Female students could also be offered online mentoring by accomplished women working in STEM fields, a tack taken by Women in Technology Sharing Online (WitsOn). The brainchild of Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and the president of Harvey Mudd College, WitsOn was a one-time, six-week-long program that Klawe hopes to organize again in the future.

All these approaches have in common a focus, not on teaching girls and women differently, but on helping them to feel differently about their place in the fields of math and science. Just as in the physical world, in the virtual sphere the barriers to girls’ and women’s advancement in STEM fields remain very much in place. With informed intervention and clever design, however, the digital walls may prove easier to scale.

Prestige vs. Major

By Scott Jaschik.  Source: Inside Higher Ed  ::

If you are a young woman who hopes to earn as much as the men in your education cohort, is it more important to go to Stanford or to study (anywhere) computer science?

Obviously one could study computer science at Stanford, but for those who don’t have that option, new research says that young women can close the income gap with men if they pursue lucrative majors (science, technology, mathematics and business). But those women who don’t study in those fields and who enroll in elite institutions are destined to earn much less than their male counterparts.

The research has just been published in The Review of Higher Education (abstract available here) and it arrives at a time of much debate over how much students should be encouraged to enroll in certain fields.

In the study, more than 2,000 students — randomly selected from the National Education Longitudinal Study — were tracked by institution attended, field of study and post-graduation earnings up until the age of 26. Various control factors were used to compare similarly qualified students. The topic is important, write the two authors, because women on average lag men in salaries, earning about 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man — and the gap is greater for those with at least a bachelor’s degree. The two authors are Yingyi Ma, associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University, and Gokhan Savas, assistant professor of sociology at Luther College.

For women who attended elite institutions, the gender pay gap persists, they found. But for women who study in the lucrative majors, the pay gap disappears — regardless of the prestige of the institution the women attend. And the impact appears to be strongest for disadvantaged women, who otherwise face large pay gaps with men.

It’s not that women don’t gain anything by attending an elite institution, Ma said in an interview, but men gain more. At non-elite institutions, the impact of education appears to be equal for men and women who pursue high-demand fields.

Because the study only tracks people up until age 26, she said, there is a chance that graduate education changes the equation.

Ma said that she believes the reason elite colleges don’t close the gender gap is the greater access of male students at those institutions to connections that will help their careers. “A man with a history major can go to Wall Street and make a lot of money, but that’s not the case for women,” she said; a woman needs the business degree. “Fields of study appears to be the key.”

She stressed that she was not saying women shouldn’t attend top colleges or study non-lucrative majors. But she said that women for whom pay is a key factor — especially perhaps for women from disadvantaged backgrounds — need to know that there’s more at play in their later earnings than where they go to college.

Island Energy Inquiry PD Workshop, Oahu, October 2014

IEI Professional Development Workshop Series

Oahu – October 9 & 10, 2014

Download Flyer Here
Register Now

Time: 9:00am – 4:00pm
Fee: $20 (secures registration)
Required: 2 online follow-up sessions. Dates TBD

Note: We will select our classes from those who register. If you’re accepted, we’ll send information regarding PD signup and fee payment.

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New ASEE-NAE Report on Barriers to Ethnic Diversity

“Surmounting the Barriers” has recommendations for the university-level engineering and engineering technology education community to improve diversity.

Download the PDF here.

Study: Uncivil work environment pushing women out of the engineering field

By Brigid Schulte, August 9. Source: Washington Post.

Commander Jill Richards who teaches weapons and system engineering at the Naval Academy helps with sheep heart dissection during the Naval Academy’s STEM program (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) “girls-only” workshop (Photo by Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post)

“Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been” – Albert Einstein

Workers with skills in science, engineering, math and technology are among the most in demand and highest paid of any sector. They are seen as key drivers of innovation, problem-solving and economic growth, who will help shape the future.

And most of them are men.

While that news is hardly shocking, a new National Science Foundation report released on Saturday about why so few women go into engineering, or stay in the field, highlights a key reason: a workplace culture of incivility toward women.

“I wouldn’t call it a hostile environment, but it’s definitely chilly,” said Nadya Fouad, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who presented the results to the American Psychological Association in a talk entitled “Leaning In, But Getting Pushed Back (and Out.)”

Fouad and her colleagues surveyed more than 5,000 women who had graduated from some of the top universities with engineering degrees over the past six decades and found that 40 percent had either quit the field or never entered the profession in the first place.

For more than two decades, women have accounted for about 20 percent of all engineering degrees. Yet fewer than 11 percent of all engineers are women. And this despite a massive funding effort to get more people into STEM fields – $3.4 billion in federal funds for STEM education since fiscal 2010, with $13 million targeted directly at women.

And while caregiving responsibilities – the stereotypical view for why women leave demanding professions – played a role in some decisions, for the most part Fouad found that what really pushed women out were uncivil workplace climates, the expectation to put in long hours of face time in the office, and the perception that there was little opportunity to advance.

Of the women who left the field less than five years ago, two-thirds pursued better opportunities in other fields, — 72 percent became either managers or executives. One-third said they stayed home with children because their companies didn’t accommodate work-life conflicts.

“It’s not about ‘fixing the women’ – making them more confident or anything. It’s really about the climate in the workplace,” Fouad said. “We found that even women who are staying consider leaving because they don’t have supervisor support. They don’t have training and development opportunities. And their colleagues are incivil to them, belittle them, talk behind their backs and undermine them.”

On top of that are inflexible workplace cultures that demand long hours for no clear work-related reasons.

“One woman said, ‘My supervisor makes me stay every night until he talks to all of us, and he never gets to me before 10 p.m.,” Fouad said. “You can say, ‘She should have gone and talked to him.’ But the point is, why isn’t somebody saying, ‘Why are you keeping all your employees here until that late?’”

Fouad said that their report, which was a three-year effort, is filled with similar comments. She had originally hoped to 1,200 women would respond to the survey. Instead, 5,300 women did, unleashing a wave of pent-up frustration, disappointment and anger. “We really touched a nerve,” she said.

“I think the men in power are unaware – or at least I hope it’s just that they’re unaware – of how the climate is for women,” she continued. “And they have no incentive to change, because they personally aren’t experiencing it.”

The findings add weight and context to previous looks at why more women don’t go into or don’t stay in STEM fields. Another report by the American Association of University Women, “Why So Few?” highlighted the roles of stereotypes that women aren’t “naturally” smart enough, and implicit or unconscious bias that these are careers for men.

In fact, they noted that the ratio of children being identified as mathematically gifted, scoring 700 or higher on their SAT at age 13, had dropped from 13:1 of boys to girls 30 years ago, to 3:1. And before administering tests, studies have shown, when girls are reminded that they are equally as capable of boys, performance differences disappear – a sign, some argue, of how powerful girls themselves react to the stereotype.

The AAUW report also cited a lack of role models. In the United States, women make up about 12 percent of engineering professors, one of the lowest percentages in all STEM fields, where women are more likely to make up 18 to 22 percent of the faculty.

Fouad and her colleagues are at work on another study that looks at best practices and what companies can do to attract and retain more women engineers.

The solution? Creating welcoming and supportive work environments.

Drawing from responses from women engineers who were satisfied in their workplaces and were advancing in their careers, Fouad makes four recommendations:

• Recognize the problem. That women aren’t leaving just because they want to spend time with their children. They’re leaving because of the difficult workplace climate and lack of opportunity to advance.

• Change starts from the top. Managers must create a culture that doesn’t tolerate incivility and condescension toward women, and respects all employees’ work-life obligations.

• Implement system-wide changes. Invest in professional training and development and make clear how people advance, with fair criteria. In other words, break up the ‘old boy network’ for getting ahead.

• Implement role-level changes. Communicate clearly what needs to be done, how and by when.

“These are all things that can change,” Fouad said. “Because this is not a ‘woman’s issue.’ This is about creating a good work environment. And good work environments are good for everybody.”

::Brigid Schulte writes about work-life issues and poverty, seeking to understand what it takes to live The Good Life across race, class and gender.::

Harvey Mudd’s Klawe Maps Way to Woo Young Women Into Tech

By Peter Burrows Aug 7, 2014.  Source: Harvey Mudd College via Bloomberg.

::WIT applauds Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, for her outstanding efforts in motivating women to become computer scientists. Women now make up nearly half of Harvey Mudd’s CS majors. Next step is for tech companies to step up and promote greater equity in their hiring practices!::

Under president Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd College has found a formula for attracting women to study computer science.

Earlier this year, Maria Klawe persuaded Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella to spend a day at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Phoenix this October.

She dangled the prospect of his becoming the first man ever to be a headline speaker at the event. For the 8,000 female technologists and diversity activists planning to attend, Klawe herself may be the bigger draw.

Since she became president of Harvey Mudd College in 2006, the 800-student liberal arts college near Los Angeles has made tangible progress creating a blueprint for encouraging women to become computer scientists. Last year, more than half the school’s engineering majors were female for the first time. Women made up a record 47 percent of its computer science majors.

Bigger challenges lie beyond Harvey Mudd’s gates. Across the country only 19 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering go to women, and there’s still a dearth of female computer scientists at the most influential technology companies.

“We love that Harvey Mudd is producing great talent and showing great leadership, but people still tend to hire people like themselves,” said Evan Wittenberg, senior vice president of people at Box Inc., a storage startup based in Los Altos, California. “The industry norms are pretty sad.”

Engineering Degrees

The school’s advances have coincided with heightened scrutiny of the technology industry’s demographics. According to the American Society for Engineering Education, women received a slightly higher percentage of bachelor’s degrees in engineering in 2013 — 19.1 percent — than they did in 2009, when the number was 17.8 percent. A U.S. Census Bureau report found women’s employment in computer occupations was 27 percent in 2011. By comparison, in 2013 women made up 47 percent of the total ranks of the employed in the U.S.

The gap is even bigger at many large technology companies. After years of refusing to publicly disclose diversity data, Google Inc. (GOOG) said in May that 17 percent of its technical employees are women. Facebook Inc. (FB) and Twitter Inc. said women make up 15 percent and 10 percent of their respective technological staffs. And comments from entrepreneurs, such as Uber Technologies Inc.’s Travis Kalanick and Snapchat Inc.’s Evan Spiegel, have raised concerns about chauvinism in the startup community.

Klawe, who was born in Canada and lived in Scotland as a child, has melded lessons gleaned from a long career that included stints as an International Business Machines Corp. researcher and dean of Princeton University’s engineering school. Now, as head of a college with a focus on science and technology, her mission is to encourage young women who hadn’t considered a career in technology to move in that direction.

CS Neophytes

“I’d be surprised if 20 of our 85 graduates last year had any experience with computer science before college,” Klawe, 63, said in an interview at her office, decorated with many of her own abstract paintings.

Linnea Nelson, going into her sophomore year at Mudd, said upper-classmen eased her mind by telling her the introductory class was easy.

“If it had been a different school, I’d have been too afraid to take it,” said Nelson, who said she’s likely to major in computer science. “We grow up with this idea that you have to be a guy who’s been programming in his parents’ basement since he was 5 to study computer science.”

Klawe’s formula starts with hiring plenty of female faculty. This year, four of seven department chairs at Mudd are women, as are five of 13 computer science professors. About 23 percent of female applicants are accepted, versus 9.8 percent of men, Klawe said.

‘Full-Court Press’

Once a female student is accepted, she is showered with phone calls from faculty and students seeking to persuade her to attend Harvey Mudd.

“They put on a full-court press,” said Dan Garcia, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “They can reach girls who might be wondering if they’re going to be the only girl in a room full of boys. With 6,400 young women being admitted each year, we can’t do that.”

Once classes begin, all students — female and male — must take an introductory computer science class called CS-5. Mudd professors are under orders from Klawe to urge students to consider making computer science their minor, if not their major. The pitch is that knowing the basics will help the students in any field they choose, and provide a lucrative backup plan.

Real Challenges

“Instead of being another biology grad that didn’t get into a good med school, you’re a biology grad that can go to Google and make $95,000 as a programmer,” Klawe said.

CS-5 and follow-on courses focus on how computer science can be applied to real challenges, from education to entertainment to medicine. It’s also designed to be fun. In one assignment, teams of students used computers to analyze DNA streams to see which of their professors was lactose intolerant, said Samantha Stilson, a Mudd senior.

“I was afraid it was going to be all that math stuff — I hate math,” Stilson said. “But it was about real-life problems.”

If CS-5 piqued Stilson’s interest, attending the Grace Hopper conference — as all first-year Mudd women are invited to do — sealed the deal. At this year’s event, named for a pioneering computer scientist in the 1950s who became a rear admiral in the Navy, Klawe will interview Microsoft’s Nadella onstage. Klawe has been on Microsoft’s board since 2009.

“I credit Grace Hopper with being the reason I wanted to go into tech at all,” Stilson said. “I’m majoring in international relations, but I’m doing computer science because I couldn’t give it up.”

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is a sponsor of the conference.

More Schools

Mudd has opened its technology-related courses to students at four nearby schools that are also part of the Claremont Colleges. Last fall, 117 women from these schools took computer-science courses at Mudd, up from 13 in 2010.

Other schools are also gaining ground. Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh has been adding programs since the late 1990s, including “sleeping bag weekends,” in which current female students spend time with prospective ones, said professor Lenore Blum. The incoming class in the school’s computer science program this year is 40 percent female.

Stanford University’s bachelor’s degrees in computer science awarded have jumped to 23 percent from 8 percent women in the past three years, while Berkeley has gone to 23 percent from 13 percent, according to the American Society of Engineering Education.

Scaling Solutions

While her progress has been admirable, Klawe’s efforts — at a small, well-funded school that costs $48,000 a year — aren’t a panacea, said Ignatios Vakalis, head of the computer science department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Most programs can’t afford to hire sought-after female professors, and publicly financed state schools aren’t allowed to tip the application process to accept more women or create gender-specific scholarships, he said. At Cal Poly, the incoming class of computer science majors has risen to 29 percent women this year from 15 percent in 2011, he said.

“Maria is my role model, and a wonderful person and computer scientist,” Vakalis said. “But as she will acknowledge, her model works best at small private schools.”

Lessons Learned

Klawe is optimistic about Silicon Valley’s ability to adopt lessons learned at Mudd. She cites Facebook as an example. A few years ago, she suggested the Menlo Park, California-based company hire a promising researcher named Fiona Condon, only to be told she wasn’t technical enough.

Now, she said the world’s largest social-networking company has worked to improve its hiring practices. While women make up 15 percent of Facebook’s technical staff, she’s been told that’s an increase from 2.5 percent in 2008.

Achieving gender equality may be tougher in the world of technology finance and startups. About 4 percent of venture capital partners are women, according to a recent Fortune magazine survey.

To counter this, male financiers need to test their own behavior and look out for chauvinism at their portfolio companies, said Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures. That includes taming the so-called brogrammer culture at some startups founded and staffed by men just out of college.

“A lot of these guys haven’t experienced the fullness of life,” Ganesan said. “As VCs, hopefully we can help.”

Hidden Biases

Klawe is concerned about hidden biases at the venture firms themselves. On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, she was shocked by the attire of the receptionists in offices along Sand Hill Road.

“They’re all wearing low-cut blouses and short skirts,” she said. “I was just stunned. I mean, what century are we in?”

Still, at the technology companies themselves, the new push for diversity has given women one measurable advantage, said Cal Poly’s Vakalis: top female graduates in computer science now make about $5,000 more than male peers, he said.

“There’s an unquenchable thirst to get more women into tech,” he said. “These young women know this, and play the game to get the compensation they deserve.”

(Original article can be found here.)

Math enthusiast shares her passion with youngsters

Driven by her love for math and desire to give back to the community, 17-year-old Jasmine Doan founded the Maui Math Circle. She completed the first year of the project with the support of Maui Economic Development Board’s Women in Technology Project; her school, Seabury Hall; and the new Puu Kukui Elementary School in Wailuku, where the community service program is held.

“I love math…it’s kind of like a puzzle.” – Jasmine Doan, Maui Math Circle

“I love math…it’s kind of like a puzzle.” – Jasmine Doan, Maui Math Circle

It works like this: Middle and high school students like Doan and her peers get together once a month to teach advanced math concepts and problem solving skills to 3rd, 4th- and 5th-graders during after-school hours. There are as many as 15 volunteers matched up with 50 to 75 younger students.

Doan describes the project as a math enrichment, not a tutoring session. “It’s supposed to be for students who really want to learn more about advanced math. We try to make it fun and encourage the students to be creative in how they approach math,” she said. Doan has long enjoyed math, having finished Advanced Placement Calculus in the 6th grade. She hopes to work either as a computer science engineer or an entrepreneur, like her parents, Jason and Shirley Doan of Kahului. “I just love math. I think a lot of people don’t see that math is such a creative process,” she said. “I like how it’s kind of like a puzzle.”

Heading into her senior year, Doan serves as a competitor and coach for middle and high school-aged students in a variety of math competitions. As captain of her school’s math team, Doan spearheaded a win in state competition this past May. Maui Math Circle is on summer break and will return in September when Doan will serve on an advisory board with the goal of continuing the project even after she leaves the island for college.

For more information, visit: https://www.sites.google.com/site/mauimathcircle808/home or https://www.facebook.com/MauiMathCircle

STEMworks™ interns hone skills in technology, patience

Wyman Tong, STEMworks intern at ArdentMC

KIHEI, HI — As summer draws to an end, college-bound freshman Phyllis Raquinio said she’s learned to be more patient and grateful for the experience to work as a professional. “The STEMworks™ internship helped me learn about being professional around the people I work with and taught me to keep up to date with technology for my future profession,” Raquinio said, referring to the internship coordinated by Maui Economic Development Board’s Women in Technology Project. For Wyman Tong, his internship at ArdentMC was challenging and yet met his expectations. “This is my second year doing the STEMworks™ internship, and I have enjoyed them both,” he said.

In total, the Women in Technology Project, a statewide workforce initiative at MEDB, placed 30 students in a variety of six-week internships throughout the state. The STEMworks™ program provides students with access to high tech tools, software training, project design, career exposure and internship opportunities to learn from mentors and gain the real-world job experience, knowledge and skills they’ll need when they join the 21st century workforce. Raquinio, a 17-year-old Maui High School graduate, worked from home and met with her mentors on a weekly basis. Paired with Pedego Maui, which has sites at the Lahaina Gateway and the Kahana Gateway Shopping Center, Raquinio was assigned to “renovate” the electric bike tour company’s blog, create a Facebook page and create and edit videos. “The STEMworks™ internship contributed to honing my skills,” she said, adding that she learned new and innovative ways of using technology for communication.

Tong, who’s enrolling at the University of Hawaii Maui College this fall, said his internship gave him the first-time experience with programming work and insight into what software engineers do. “Even if an internship is not what you expect or does not fit your interests, you still get to spend time with very important people who can share their experiences and opinions with you,” he said. MEDB’s WIT project has been building STEM internships for 15 years, placing both high school and college students on all islands across the state ranging from the Pearl Harbor Shipyards to restoring fishponds and native vegetation on Molokai.

MEDB Ke Alahele Education Fund benefits STEM programs at home

WAILEA, HI — The annual MEDB Ke Alahele Education Fund Dinner & Auction returns on Saturday, August 23. Held at the Grand Wailea Resort, this annual event raises needed funds for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs in our community.

Guests will bid on fabulous prizes at the popular Apples for Education Auctions, compete in a lively “Are You Smarter Than a STEM 5th Grader?” game, and mingle with Distinguished Educators – Lieutenant Governor Shan Tsutsui and his wife Lyndelle and Mayor Alan Arakawa and his wife Ann – as well as your friends and neighbors. This year’s winner of the Senator Daniel K. Inouye Innovation Award, which honors the legacy of the late U.S. Senator, will also be announced.

The Reception and Silent Auction begins at 4:30 pm, followed by dinner and a program and Live Auction at 6:30 pm.

Sponsorships are available.  Event tickets are $175 per person.  For reservations and information, contact Maui Economic Development Board at 808-875-2300 or visit www.medb.org.

Throughout Maui County, STEM education is empowering students and teachers, thanks to donors of the MEDB Ke Alahele Education Fund. This past school year, the Fund awarded nearly $175,000 which enabled Robotics teams to compete on Maui, Oahu and even the mainland; equipped digital media labs and engineering technology programs with the latest tools, software and training; prepared students for going head-to-head with national digital media peers, and organized the annual Science Olympiad.

“Thanks to generous businesses and other community stakeholders, we have touched thousands of students,” said Jeanne Skog, MEDB President and CEO. “Donors send a clear message to our students of the value of pursuing careers in STEM.”

For reservations and information, contact Maui Economic Development Board, at 808-875-2300 or visit www.medb.org. Sponsorships for the MEDB Ke Alahele Education Fund Benefit Dinner & Auction are available.