SWE-NESS took on a goal to become more involved with girls in middle school (5th and 6th grades), particularly to help them visualize what careers in math and science might be like. We felt a good opportunity to do this would be through the Girl Scouts (GS) by organizing a science badge workshop. We started working with the Rhode Island Council because one of our members (now the Career Guidance Chair) is a Rhode Island Girl Scout herself, holding positions of GS leader, Community Junior Age Level Program Consultant, Trainer, and Community Association Coordinator. It was in the latter position where she established a working relationship with the GSRI Council, which helped us get started with the workshops. By taking a poll among the Rhode Island Girl Scout leaders to find out which badge they would most like to see the girls achieve and which would be conducive to the workshop atmosphere, we chose the Science Sleuth badge for the first workshop in 1994.
We receive help from SWE student sections of the US Coast Guard Academy, the University of Rhode Island (URI), Roger Williams University (RWU) and Brown University in running the individual stations for the workshop. In addition to the two workshops we hold in the fall/winter at RWU and URI for the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island Council (GSRI), we also hold the same workshop for the Connecticut Trails Council at Connecticut College in the spring.
We alternate the type of workshop we present each year to GSRI girls, giving the Scouts an opportunity to earn the Science Sleuth badge one year and a different science badge the following year. We had been alternating the Science Sleuth with the Science in Action badge workshop, where the girls earned the complete Science in Action badge and also earned 3/5 of the requirements for the Science in the Worlds Around Us badge. However, this workshop was not as hands-on as the Science Sleuth one, due to the nature of the requirements for the badges, so we have dropped offering this workshop as the alternating one to Science Sleuth and are instead presenting the Science Discovery badge workshop as the new alternate, starting in the fall of 1999. By alternating these two badge workshops (Science Discovery and Science Sleuth) every other year, we are able to reach a good number (100 per workshop) of the middle-school-age children in the SWE-NESS area and hopefully encourage them in their investigation of science. These workshops have been revised to the new 2001 Junior badge book and are available online at the SWE CG page. (http://www.swe.org/SWE/StudentServices/CareerGuidance/GirlScoutModules/girlscout_activity.html)
The Connecticut Trails Girl Scouts will have a different badge workshop from the GSRI Scouts, starting in March 2003. The new Making It Matter badge will be earned by the girls as they go through stations run by the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Cadets and SWE-NESS members. This badge gives the girls insight into various engineering disciplines such as chemical, plastics, electrical, mechanical, civil and others by hands-on activities, as well as doing some reverse engineering in finding out how an object works and what it's made out of and why.
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