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For The First Time In History, Girls Win All The Top 5 Prizes Of The National STEM Competition
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For The First Time In History, Girls Win All The Top 5 Prizes Of The National STEM Competition

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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

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.

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Sidor Clare

Sidor Clare

Clare the 14-year-old from Sandy, Utah, won the $10,000 Marconi/Samueli Award for Innovation .

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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.

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“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.

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She designed a water filter using carbon to remove heavy metals from water.

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kathrynhatfield avatar
KatHat
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Love this, what a great milestone! Keep going, ladies; this is just the start of many more accomplishments.

viviane_katz avatar
Viviane Katz
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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...
sassybooie avatar
Meeow
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Lauren is so damn smart, you go girl!!! Don’t be afraid of moving forward. The future is bright.

troydavis avatar
Troy Davis
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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!

troydavis avatar
Troy Davis
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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...
ellieragsdale avatar
Ellie Ragsdale
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

pixie420 avatar
J. Normal
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

richr avatar
Rich R
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

And the best part about it is that it totally wasn't determined by social justice and left-wing bias.

augustogetirana avatar
Augusto Getirana
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

crazytownmcplod avatar
Amelia Park
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

shonuff avatar
Sho Nuff
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

If you think all the winners coincidentally happened to all be girls I have a bridge to sell you. They made sure it was all girls. There are so many gullible people.

cruzarts avatar
Steve Cruz
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This gave me the same chills as watching the 2018 documentary SCIENCE FAIR, about teens from around the world whose passions for discovery brought them to the Intel Int'l Science competition. GO SMARTIES!

grace-nickel1 avatar
DANNY DIVITO
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

ok nice post but all these trans phobic comments just f**k off already c**t!

captaindash avatar
Full Name
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I'm so on board with the blind spot idea. I can't tell you how many vehicles have brutal, awful, terrible, garbage lines of sight. Side note, Ejiaga is 14? Jesus, she looks like she should be in the board room, not freshman class in high school.

marvel_madden avatar
Marvel Madden
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

So they stack the deck with more females - probably did the same with the judges. Amazing how it’s good to recognize gender success as long as it’s not a male.

isaacdixon avatar
Isaac Dixon
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Interesting to me how many of these children are the daughters of immigrant families. Education has always been the great benefit of immigration. By the way, I also noticed that there are no black boys in any of the photos.

daviddownie avatar
David Downie
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I wonder what howls of outrage would have been like if only boys had won? It's tempting to think that this was a fix because you'd expect to see either an even distribution of prizes between the sexes or a slight advantage to one or the other. The problem will soon be about empowering young males as there is a situation developing, only in the western world, were however good they are they can't succeed.

kkittywidget avatar
Karen Klinck
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Not really. For the past decade or so young men have actually been discouraged from 'excessive learning'. We seem to have a fad going that only sports and 'manly' pursuits are important. (Shades of Hitler's Germany.) Women, on the So stop pushing sports as all-important other hand, are being encouraged by older women to learn, because now they CAN. So stop pushing sports as all-important and tell boys it's really OK for them to read again!

Load More Replies...
ilikepie22334 avatar
John Smith
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

All boys win: a travesty of justice! All girls win: woot woot!

sean_bullough avatar
Sean Harrison
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

I commend the kids for doing well, but the girl that "developed" a method of reducing blind spots in cars, Saab developed that same thing back in the 1980's.

dwaynedixon avatar
Dwayne Dixon
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

This comment has been deleted.

orders_4 avatar
Liam Walsh
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Because that headline would have been the norm for 100s of years (should the competition have been around that long). You cannot pretend that boys didn't dominate these subjects and that girls were actively discouraged because of the simple fact that they were female. The fact that it was wrongly assumed that girls didn't even have the ability. How about looking past your hurt ego and seeing this change as being something good? An extra resource of amazing ideas and invention when we are in great need as a planet?

Load More Replies...
drums911 avatar
Tim Lobb
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

And if I'm not mistaken, these are REAL girls; not boys who've "transgendered"! Excellent!

verdene_9 avatar
Eva Verde
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

Congratulations. But making a big fuss about all the girls winning sounds a bit like, "See, girls are better than boys!" I'm sure boys had good ideas too. I hope girls won because their ideas were genuinely better.

srichmond16 avatar
Suzieq
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

How do you get an inference of " girls are better than boys" ? And you " hope" the winning ideas were better. That is exactly the kind of snark that perfectly illustrates why this is a milestone and worthy of news coverage.

Load More Replies...
kathrynhatfield avatar
KatHat
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Love this, what a great milestone! Keep going, ladies; this is just the start of many more accomplishments.

viviane_katz avatar
Viviane Katz
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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...
sassybooie avatar
Meeow
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Lauren is so damn smart, you go girl!!! Don’t be afraid of moving forward. The future is bright.

troydavis avatar
Troy Davis
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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!

troydavis avatar
Troy Davis
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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...
ellieragsdale avatar
Ellie Ragsdale
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

pixie420 avatar
J. Normal
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

richr avatar
Rich R
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

And the best part about it is that it totally wasn't determined by social justice and left-wing bias.

augustogetirana avatar
Augusto Getirana
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

crazytownmcplod avatar
Amelia Park
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

shonuff avatar
Sho Nuff
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

If you think all the winners coincidentally happened to all be girls I have a bridge to sell you. They made sure it was all girls. There are so many gullible people.

cruzarts avatar
Steve Cruz
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This gave me the same chills as watching the 2018 documentary SCIENCE FAIR, about teens from around the world whose passions for discovery brought them to the Intel Int'l Science competition. GO SMARTIES!

grace-nickel1 avatar
DANNY DIVITO
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

ok nice post but all these trans phobic comments just f**k off already c**t!

captaindash avatar
Full Name
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I'm so on board with the blind spot idea. I can't tell you how many vehicles have brutal, awful, terrible, garbage lines of sight. Side note, Ejiaga is 14? Jesus, she looks like she should be in the board room, not freshman class in high school.

marvel_madden avatar
Marvel Madden
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

So they stack the deck with more females - probably did the same with the judges. Amazing how it’s good to recognize gender success as long as it’s not a male.

isaacdixon avatar
Isaac Dixon
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Interesting to me how many of these children are the daughters of immigrant families. Education has always been the great benefit of immigration. By the way, I also noticed that there are no black boys in any of the photos.

daviddownie avatar
David Downie
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I wonder what howls of outrage would have been like if only boys had won? It's tempting to think that this was a fix because you'd expect to see either an even distribution of prizes between the sexes or a slight advantage to one or the other. The problem will soon be about empowering young males as there is a situation developing, only in the western world, were however good they are they can't succeed.

kkittywidget avatar
Karen Klinck
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Not really. For the past decade or so young men have actually been discouraged from 'excessive learning'. We seem to have a fad going that only sports and 'manly' pursuits are important. (Shades of Hitler's Germany.) Women, on the So stop pushing sports as all-important other hand, are being encouraged by older women to learn, because now they CAN. So stop pushing sports as all-important and tell boys it's really OK for them to read again!

Load More Replies...
ilikepie22334 avatar
John Smith
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

All boys win: a travesty of justice! All girls win: woot woot!

sean_bullough avatar
Sean Harrison
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

I commend the kids for doing well, but the girl that "developed" a method of reducing blind spots in cars, Saab developed that same thing back in the 1980's.

dwaynedixon avatar
Dwayne Dixon
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

This comment has been deleted.

orders_4 avatar
Liam Walsh
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Because that headline would have been the norm for 100s of years (should the competition have been around that long). You cannot pretend that boys didn't dominate these subjects and that girls were actively discouraged because of the simple fact that they were female. The fact that it was wrongly assumed that girls didn't even have the ability. How about looking past your hurt ego and seeing this change as being something good? An extra resource of amazing ideas and invention when we are in great need as a planet?

Load More Replies...
drums911 avatar
Tim Lobb
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

And if I'm not mistaken, these are REAL girls; not boys who've "transgendered"! Excellent!

verdene_9 avatar
Eva Verde
Community Member
4 years ago

This comment is hidden. Click here to view.

Congratulations. But making a big fuss about all the girls winning sounds a bit like, "See, girls are better than boys!" I'm sure boys had good ideas too. I hope girls won because their ideas were genuinely better.

srichmond16 avatar
Suzieq
Community Member
4 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

How do you get an inference of " girls are better than boys" ? And you " hope" the winning ideas were better. That is exactly the kind of snark that perfectly illustrates why this is a milestone and worthy of news coverage.

Load More Replies...
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