Vermont Afterschool is proud to be part of the Million Girls Moonshot initiative, working to inspire and prepare the next generation of innovators by engaging one million more girls in STEM learning opportunities through OST programs over the next five years. The Million Girls Moonshot is an initiative of the STEM Next Opportunity Fund. The Million Girls Moonshot seeks to re-imagine who can engineer, who can build, who can make. See below for some information and resources that can help advance this goal!
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January is National Mentoring Month—a national celebration of the role models and mentors that have made monumental differences in the lives of so many. Listed as one of Moonshot’s four transformative practices, role models and mentors play a significant role in showing young women what is possible for them in STEM.
Resources for Mentoring Month
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- Career Girls – A comprehensive video-based career exploration tool for girls featuring diverse women STEM role models. It’s free to use and contains 16,000 videos, as well as career quizzes and resources.
- FabFems – A collection of resources for role models, educators, and parents to inspire and educate girls about science, computer science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses and careers. The website includes Resources for Role Models and Resources for Girls.
- National Mentoring Resource Center – A collection of mentoring resources including handbooks, curricula, manuals, and other resources that practitioners can use to implement and further develop program practices.
FREE Activities
- Educator Guide: Explore Mars With Scratch (Grades 3-8; requires hardware; multiple sessions) – This activity is divided into multiple sections. The first section is an introduction to setting up a Mars rover game using the Scratch programming language. It can be completed as a stand-alone lesson, or in conjunction with several other sections, depending on student and teacher familiarity with Scratch and block-based programming languages.
- Educator Guide: Mars Rover Driver Board Game (Grades 3-8; no hardware required; multiple sessions) – In this board-game lesson, students play the roles of a Mars rover, scientist, and engineer to make exploration decisions and accomplish science goals. Students learn to write basic command sequences, which lay the groundwork for developing computer programming skills. Includes a variety of videos and other resources to learn about computing and Mars.
- Engineering is Elementary’s NASA Partnership Activity Toolkit – A suite of free NASA-funded STEM resources and activities for students in grades 3-8. All resources are research-based, classroom-tested, and designed to support students’ understanding of space, while helping them see themselves as capable problem solvers.
