From the beginning of the summer, my team and I were working on two main projects, creating a website of STEM resources and a mystery game guidebook. I am excited to announce that we completed our goals for this grant! Also, along the way, we got a wonderful surprise from an NGO helping foster care kids. They noticed our previous project and contacted me to ask if we would be willing to help create a STEM activity program for their summer school. We started thinking about how we could use the CSGC grant for the children’s benefit and decided to restructure our budget to use some of the money to print the guidebook and donate it to the kids. Seeing the kids’ excitement when they discovered that we would create a STEM program and bring mystery game guidebooks made us very excited and happy that our project suffered a couple of changes.
Below is the description of the projects we managed with the CSGC grant.
- The STEM website: www.gstemoldova.org
For almost two months, we have been working on building a website that we hope will benefit hundreds of kids across Moldova and even those who live in Romania. The primary goal is to create a STEM space where anyone can access and benefit from the vast database of resources. We strive to raise the number of children interested in STEM and support those who wish to compete on the Olympiad level, especially girls and those who live in rural areas. To make our website as helpful as possible, we decided to have a couple of pages with:
- News and announcement – for students to be aware of all new opportunities or events related to STEM
- Archive – full of resources such as previous Olympiad questions for six subjects; mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, computer science, and geography.
- Research – student-written research on any subject related to STEM to promote knowledge development in an exciting area by inspiring other peers
- Forum – a place where students can ask any question and receive answers
- About us – a page dedicated to our organization and its members to inspire girls in the stem community and display all of our projects and resources.
We genuinely believe that this website will change the course of children’s interest in STEM, especially by offering more free and easily accessible resources to girls. We are very proud to say that this is the first website of this kind in the entire Republic of Moldova, and we are very thankful for the CGSC grant, which made it happen!
Right now, our website is in the beta version because of the complexity of its code, and we estimate to have it finished by mid-September.
We wrote a guidebook where anyone could solve fun and intriguing mystery by paying attention to detail and using shared knowledge and the internet. We chose the criminology subject to draw Moldavian girls’ attention to this exciting subject. We hope this guidebook will inspire young girls to pursue a career in science and reveal how creative it can be.
- Mystery guide
Besides the mystery itself, we also tried to implement different sciences in this guidebook. We included various medical and toxicology reports that show what official medical paperwork should look like. This information is tough to find online, and we hope that girls interested in medicine get to have an inside scoop on how things work in hospitals and clinics.
After solving the mystery, anyone can send their answer to us until a specific date. If they are one of the first three to get the answer right, they get a prize from Girls in STEM. This way, we get to interact with our followers and transform this murder mystery into something more fun and interactive.
- Help orphanage kids
Our goal is to reach as many girls as possible, especially those in need. We are printing out copies and donating them to a Moldavian orphanage. We hope our project could reach as many people as possible and spread awareness about the endless possibilities in science.
We are delighted that we could use some of the CSGC grant for the kids from orphanages! These booklets and our STEM summer school program were supposed to be implemented at the camp. Still, because a great majority of the kids didn’t have the documentation to participate, the NGO organizing postponed it until October while solving the problem. Unfortunately, we don’t have photos with the kids from the camp, so instead, we decided to show you the PDF of the guidebook and the STEM program we prepared for them.
-Ana Vizitiv ’23