Techbridge Girls Aims to Move the Needle on STEM Education For Girls
For CEO Nikole Collins-Puri and the team at Techbridge Girls, scaling equitable STEM education isn’t about the resources, the teachers, or the donors. It’s about putting students at the center of the program’s design.
“Consumer marketing groups do this so well,” Collins-Puri says. “They study their audience, and they translate how they sell products based on what they've learned, and their audience becomes loyal. It's the same concept in STEM education.” She says that a student-centric model, continuous iteration, and rigorous evaluation has made Techbridge Girl programs successful, and powered the organization’s growth, over the past two decades. And that iteration process keeps lessons, training, and programming relatable and fun for students.
“It's a curriculum that we're bringing to life by showing our girls through their own learning and experience of actually doing it.” For example, she says (stereotypes aside), many middle school girls are interested in beauty products, from making their own chapstick to designing scents.
“So we start with that. The interest is, ‘Oh, I can make my own makeup, I can make my own lip balm. That's amazing.’” The chemical engineering components are skills built along the way as girls participate in an activity that involves mixing chemicals, learning about ratios and chemical reactions, and exploring different components and terms.
Then, educators introduce the idea that there are people making careers of this work, and they give students the opportunity to meet professionals in the field. Organizers help arrange visits with partner companies where girls can see the work of chemical engineers in action. Techbridge Girls has even developed a training curriculum for partner organizations, to ensure that when professionals are interacting with girls, they’re doing so in a way that sparks interest, respects the cultural and gender context, and illustrates the multiple dimensions of working in STEM.
The overall experience, Collins-Puri says, starts to break down the stereotype that STEM fields are isolating, boring, or irrelevant to real life, and even that STEM professionals can change the world.
“We want to show our girls that we are able to create technology that allows us to change how food is produced for countries that are in famine, or how technology has the ability to solve transportation issues for communities that don't have access,” Collins-Puri says. Illustrating that tech and engineering can be an impactful way to change the world is an important outcome that the organization is focused on tracking and quantifying in participants.
“We know our girls are achieving higher graduation rates,” Collins-Puri says, “they’re enrolling at higher rates in AP calculus, and are twice as likely as the national average to pursue STEM careers.” But evaluating the success of their programming goes deeper than top line figures.
First, Techbridge Girls tracks content and knowledge. Do their students have more knowledge of STEM concepts, like the engineering design process? Do they understand what types of careers are possible for engineers and scientists? The organization answers these questions through pre- and post-program surveys, which have helped them separate their specific impact from the growing awareness of this type of education that girls might encounter outside the program.
“We do a retrospective so we can understand the trajectory of change,” she says, rather than simply measuring what students know at different stages. But the organization is also measuring changes in identity and behaviors, a more challenging indicator to measure, which might present in students as more confidence or seeing STEM as a more likely career path.
“We really want to know, from a Techbridge Girls perspective, how is it evolving? Because ultimately, we're trying to create stickiness. Not just, ‘I got the information’ but, how are we creating stickiness so that over time they will continue to pursue and persist.” Doing just that over the next decade, Collins-Puri says, involves scaling their model with a goal to reach one million girls by 2030.
With that goal in mind, Techbridge Girls acquired the assets of an organization called Expanding Your Horizons Network. A 14 year-old, girl-serving, STEM education organization with activities in 43 states, the network serves over 25,000 girls a year and provides hands-on STEM education conferences. “We feel that this acquisition is an opportunity for us to reach more girls than we have ever been able to in our current model,” Collins-Puri says, and hopes it’ll be enough. With as many as 80% of future jobs requiring STEM skills, there is an urgency for STEM educators that she hopes to fuel.
“We believe we have the ability to create a consolidated movement that really moves the needle.” Collins-Puri says this is not only about Techbridge Girls, but it's about all of us, as girls serving education organizations, coming together to broaden the narrative so that girls from low-income communities also see themselves in this journey.
Nikole Collins-Puri
Techbridge Girls CEO
TechBridge Girls is a champion for equity in STEM education and economic opportunities for all girls. They bring a year round experience of hands-on activities that are responsive to both gender and cultural experiences, assets, values, and needs of the girls that live in under-served communities. They provide access to quality STEM education in the after-school space, primarily in Title One school districts. Programs are carried out at schools or other accessible locations and are offered free for students and at a nominal fee for schools. TechBridge Girls also provides training to other organizations on how to deliver equitable STEM education, allowing more individuals and groups to reach more girls, engage more communities, and gain the confidence to embrace STEM curriculums. Last fall, TechBridge Girls kicked off a year long celebration of their 20th anniversary with the launch of their #LeadFearlessly campaign, which will be capped off with a big celebration in May of 2020 in San Francisco.