Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
then open in external browser
and click "Open in External Browser" 
User submission
40.4K
For The First Time In History, Girls Win All The Top 5 Prizes Of The National STEM Competition
This year, something truly amazing happened in the Broadcom MASTERS National STEM Competition. Both the participants and organizers were excited to witness a historic moment. For the first time since the competition was launched in 2010, all top 5 prizes were awarded to girls. It’s not the only new milestone in the event, which took place last month.
More info: societyforscience.org | Facebook | twitter.com | youtube.com
RELATED:
Apparently, for the first time, out of 2,348 middle schoolers, more girls than boys were chosen to try out their strengths in the competition.
The finalists were judged for their knowledge of STEM subjects and demonstration of 21st-century skills, such as critical thinking, communication, creativity, collaborative skills, and teamwork. Here are the top 5 finalists:
Alaina Gassler
Gassler, the 14-year-old from West Grove, Pennsylvania won the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize for finding a way to reduce blind spots in cars.
Alaina was inspired to solve this issue by her mother who doesn’t like driving her vehicle because of its large A-pillar design. “I started to think about how blind spots are a huge problem in all cars,” Alaina says, so she went out and solved it and won a prize for it. For more about how she did it, you can read our previous article.
Sidor Clare
Sidor Clare
Clare the 14-year-old from Sandy, Utah, won the $10,000 Marconi/Samueli Award for Innovation .
She invented bricks that could be made on Mars so that space explorers wouldn’t have to bring their own building materials to the planet.
Rachel Bergey
Bergey, the 14-year-old from Harleysville, Pennsylvania, won the $10,000 Lemelson Award for Invention, for developing a trap made of tinfoil and netting for the Spotted Lanternfly, an invasive species causing damage to trees in Pennsylvania.
“Spotted Lanternflies are most likely the largest economic threat facing Pennsylvania today, and thousands of them have invaded my family’s maple trees,” says Rachel. After observing that the current method of trapping the pests with yellow sticky bands around trees is flawed, she invented a new effective method.
Lauren Ejiaga
Ejiaga the 14-year-old from New Orleans, Louisiana, won the $10,000 STEM Talent Award.
She was awarded for her research focused on how current levels of ultraviolet light from the sun due to ozone depletion impacts plant growth and performance.
Alexis MacAvoy
MacAvoy the 14-year-old from Hillsborough, California, won the $10,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Health Advancement.
She designed a water filter using carbon to remove heavy metals from water.
367Kviews
Share on Facebook
What do you think ?
KatHat 6 years ago
Love this, what a great milestone! Keep going, ladies; this is just the start of many more accomplishments.
Viviane Katz 6 years ago
Really glad to see girls in STEM. Back in the early 1980's, a brilliant girl at my school gave up her dream of becoming a surgeon because of some hangups. Something about med school looking too hard (she aced science classes!) and ambition not being feminine. So I'm happy when people are not held back by stereotypes. (I'm also celebrating that one of the winners is black--imagine if we lost an environmental scientist because of the colour of her skin).
Load More Replies...
Troy Davis 5 years ago
This is great if it really is a reflection of their achievements compared to the entire field, but I am suspicious for mere probability reasons that this is objective, since there are no reasons why boys in this years competition would be so much worse than previous years. We must also think that perhaps juries made a conscious, or unconscious, choice based on the notion that it would be just and fair for more girls to get the prizes, to encourage girls in STEM. A good idea but a bias from objective judging. So I would like to see for instance the realisations of the top 5 boys or the realisations of the top 20 to be able to better evaluate whether this is real or a biased attempt at "correcting" a perceived wrong. And in fact, i found some supporting evidence for my hypothesis in about 30 seconds looking at the original site. First, suspiciously, if you look at the picture of the 6 teams of 5 students each, you will see that ALL of them are composed of 3 girls and 2 boys!
Troy Davis 5 years ago
This is very unlikely, and probably results from an explicit injunction to schools to have more girls than boys in the teams, therefore not choosing in a gender-blind way, as should be the case for science. So another strong indication of anti-boy discrimination. Secondly, if you read the complete press release and see the sex ratio in the other 11 prizes, you see that 6 went to boys and 5 to girls, so about 50-50, what you would actually expect from a non biased evaluation ! So even by their own data, its clear that they made a purposeful push to award ALL first prizes to ONLY girls, for the headline effect, so they were in fact unscientific and dishonest, but they did not want to push the dishonesty too far so they "allowed" a fair and unbiased result in the other 11 prizes, which show equality between boys and girls, with slight boy advantage. So: please dont be gullible, keep probabilities in mind when something pops up which sounds "too good to be true", and CHECK SOURCES !
Load More Replies...
Ellie Ragsdale 6 years ago
I never thought anything like this would happen, at least not before my 40's (I'm 16). So this was a pleasant surprise. Gives me hope, as a girl who wants a STEM major someday.
J. Normal 6 years ago
My Mom wanted to be a chemist. She was exceptionally smart, it was not an option in the 20's. She became a secretary, got married and had children. She often wished out loud about being able to follow her dream. I am proud of these ladies (and the gentlemen also) Keep up the hard work.
Augusto Getirana 5 years ago
Gender quotas taking effect. I feel bad for those hard working boys who never really had any chance because the results were defined long before.
Amelia Park 5 years ago
I'm a bit worried about this. We are putting a lot of effort into making STEM interesting for girls but I fear that we may be forgetting to make it interesting for boys too - there's this assumption that boys are "naturally" attracted to STEM which isn't true. I think that we need to look into how we can avoid solving one problem while creating another.
KatHat 6 years ago
Love this, what a great milestone! Keep going, ladies; this is just the start of many more accomplishments.
Viviane Katz 6 years ago
Really glad to see girls in STEM. Back in the early 1980's, a brilliant girl at my school gave up her dream of becoming a surgeon because of some hangups. Something about med school looking too hard (she aced science classes!) and ambition not being feminine. So I'm happy when people are not held back by stereotypes. (I'm also celebrating that one of the winners is black--imagine if we lost an environmental scientist because of the colour of her skin).
Load More Replies... Troy Davis 5 years ago
This is great if it really is a reflection of their achievements compared to the entire field, but I am suspicious for mere probability reasons that this is objective, since there are no reasons why boys in this years competition would be so much worse than previous years. We must also think that perhaps juries made a conscious, or unconscious, choice based on the notion that it would be just and fair for more girls to get the prizes, to encourage girls in STEM. A good idea but a bias from objective judging. So I would like to see for instance the realisations of the top 5 boys or the realisations of the top 20 to be able to better evaluate whether this is real or a biased attempt at "correcting" a perceived wrong. And in fact, i found some supporting evidence for my hypothesis in about 30 seconds looking at the original site. First, suspiciously, if you look at the picture of the 6 teams of 5 students each, you will see that ALL of them are composed of 3 girls and 2 boys!
Troy Davis 5 years ago
This is very unlikely, and probably results from an explicit injunction to schools to have more girls than boys in the teams, therefore not choosing in a gender-blind way, as should be the case for science. So another strong indication of anti-boy discrimination. Secondly, if you read the complete press release and see the sex ratio in the other 11 prizes, you see that 6 went to boys and 5 to girls, so about 50-50, what you would actually expect from a non biased evaluation ! So even by their own data, its clear that they made a purposeful push to award ALL first prizes to ONLY girls, for the headline effect, so they were in fact unscientific and dishonest, but they did not want to push the dishonesty too far so they "allowed" a fair and unbiased result in the other 11 prizes, which show equality between boys and girls, with slight boy advantage. So: please dont be gullible, keep probabilities in mind when something pops up which sounds "too good to be true", and CHECK SOURCES !
Load More Replies... Ellie Ragsdale 6 years ago
I never thought anything like this would happen, at least not before my 40's (I'm 16). So this was a pleasant surprise. Gives me hope, as a girl who wants a STEM major someday.
J. Normal 6 years ago
My Mom wanted to be a chemist. She was exceptionally smart, it was not an option in the 20's. She became a secretary, got married and had children. She often wished out loud about being able to follow her dream. I am proud of these ladies (and the gentlemen also) Keep up the hard work.
Augusto Getirana 5 years ago
Gender quotas taking effect. I feel bad for those hard working boys who never really had any chance because the results were defined long before.
Amelia Park 5 years ago
I'm a bit worried about this. We are putting a lot of effort into making STEM interesting for girls but I fear that we may be forgetting to make it interesting for boys too - there's this assumption that boys are "naturally" attracted to STEM which isn't true. I think that we need to look into how we can avoid solving one problem while creating another.
Related on Bored Panda
203
56