STEM Ready

Inspiration

Our solution was inspired by our common struggles when deciding on a major we should do in university. All of us didn’t think that stem was an option for us as we didn’t see any female representation in STEM and didn’t have any mentors who were female to guide us on what STEM actually was. While all of us ended up going into engineering in the end, we wondered how many girls ended up not choosing a STEM major because of the same problems we experienced.

What it does

Our website will be a compatibility test that girls in grades 7, 8, and 9 can take to figure out which stem field would be best for them based on their interests. After taking the test, they will be given a list of activities they can do in their free time to prepare them for stem fields.They can also connect with mentors in the fields they’re interested in to learn from their first hand experience.

How we built it

We created a website design on Figma to demo the functionality of the website. We wanted to show what kinds of questions will be asked, and how the user can select mentors to connect with.

Challenges we ran into

We were struggling to figure out how to narrow down our solution. We had a lot of potential ideas, but we were struggling to focus on how to integrate them into a process. We also struggled to figure out which user will use our website. We were not sure whether it would be better to pick middle schoolers in grades 7, 8, and 9, or high schoolers who were looking for university programs to apply to in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the amount of work we managed to complete in a short period of time in Figma. Most of our team didn’t have any experience in Figma, so one of our group members was mentoring the others on how to use it while we were working. We are also proud of the way we were able to brainstorm and listen to everyone’s ideas. Everyone was encouraged to share their ideas and give feedback to one another, so we can all create a solution the team was proud of.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team, and divide up tasks based on everyone’s skills. The person experienced in Figma did the harder tasks when designing our solution, while the others did the easier tasks and worked on the pitch. We also learned how important it is to not stick with your first idea. When we initially came into the hackathon our group had decided on an idea that involved just the mentorship and compatibility quiz. As we were doing research and talking among ourselves throughout the day our idea changed to include activities for girls to do as well.

What's next for STEM Ready

The next step for STEM Ready would be expanding to high schoolers and providing a resource for them to figure out which stem related university program is the best fit for them. Our target was originally girls in grades 7 to 9, who would just be starting to consider what kind of job they want to do in the future. This could potentially involve creating another compatibility test, allowing the user to pick a specific field to explore in stem, and also connecting with other women in stem.

Built With

• figma