Covestro inspires girl students in India with #STEM4Girls2019 Festival

Around 4200 girls, in over 100 schools, across 5 cities over a period of 17 days, is what STEM4Girls 2019, the fourth season of #STEM4Girls, looked like for us!

In their life’s first ever hands-on science experiment, the girls learnt to light up an LED with a battery and copper tape, mixed two polymer compounds and added food grade colour to make colorful polymer putty and extracted their own DNA and adorned it as a necklace. The team behind the campaign broke ice with the girls by encouraging them to draw the circuit as art is closer to their heart. Art also found a conspicuous place on their laboratory coats, further personalizing the experience and the emotion.

Barring an initial set of instructions, the girls are really left to push their own boundaries to figure it out. They truly lived Covestro’s principles - #Curious #Courageous and #Colourful as they explored, struggled till they found their way out. This year, even their teachers were engaged as participants and encouraged to explore their knowledge with these experiment kits.

This year, the girls brought in as participants were mostly from those schools where laboratories have been installed as a part of Covestro’s Brighter World Lab project. Such schools include government and government-aided schools, municipal schools, tribal schools, and a few private schools, mostly from the vernacular medium. Respecting their regional language, the speakers spoke in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Tamil wherever possible, to be to able create a deeper connection with the girls.

This programme is carried out on ground with the support of local volunteers, who are typically female college students studying in science or, are undertaking teacher training. They are adequately briefed about the STEM4Girls approach and philosophy. For example, it is important for the participants to be allowed to make mistakes. “Are you alright?” is what they hear should something go wrong. They are encouraged to repeat the experiment any number of times until they get it right.

77 volunteers were engaged during the workshops in 2019. Having them on board to conduct the experiment sessions was also one of the levers for motivation for the participants. “I can do it” is the feeling with which each participant leaves with.

The speakers at #STEM4Girls2019 hailed from diverse professions like scientific research, academics, medicine, engineering, space science and administration. The zeal and zest of our speakers, broke myths about women and STEM-related careers, ignited young minds and filled them with dreams of a myriad possibilities.

Watch this video to see our speakers sending out waves of inspiration!