Concordia hosted more than 300 middle school students for the fifth BrainSTEM event, a day dedicated to showing STEM career possibilities and highlighting underrepresented leaders in STEM fields.
Seventh graders from Ben Franklin Middle School spent a day in several hands-on sessions learning from women or people of color who either teach at Concordia, NDSU, and MSUM, or work in the Fargo-Moorhead area.
BrainSTEM was started after Moore Engineering’s Alexa Ducioame realized whenever she was asked to lead outreach events, it was usually just girls she was teaching.
“We started this event to reduce prejudice and bias and expose everyone to women engineers,” Ducioame said.
Workshop topics included drones, pollination, human cognition, building, engineering, roadway design, codes, hibernation, and nanotechnology.
“A majority of the people I know who are in engineering knew someone who was an engineer or in construction, and that’s how they found their way into that path,” Ducioame said. “So part of this is also exposing them to different career options and different opportunities they may not have known were out there.”
Concordia’s presenters included Dr. Susan Larson, Dr. Thelma Berquo, Dr. Jennifer Sweatman, and Han Do ’19. Do runs Fargo’s Code Ninjas, a company that teaches kids how to code by making video games.
“At this age, kids love games like Roblox and Minecraft, so what better way to make it educational,” she said. “With the way the world is going with tech, even if they don’t do something STEM related, it’s good to get some knowledge behind them.”
“I think that there’s a stigma around coding and STEM that it’s boring,” Do added. “But there are a lot of exciting opportunities. And this event really helps show that.”
BrainSTEM is a partner project between the Fargo-Moorhead American Association of University Women, the North Dakota Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Concordia College, the NDSU College of Engineering, and Minnesota State University Moorhead.
The event was sponsored by John Deere, ByteSpeed, Aldevron, Moore Engineering, Inc., Houston Engineering, KLJ Engineering, Microsoft, Obermiller Nelson Engineering, NASA – MN Space Grant Consortium, and Stantec.