Nanogirl’s mission to make STEM accessible
Dr Michelle Dickinson – or Nanogirl as she’s perhaps better known – is a pro at getting children excited about science on a shoestring budget.
But when she launched Nanogirl’s Lab during lockdown, beaming experiments into children’s homes, she realised that some of them didn’t even have string. Or paper, or tape, or scissors.
Five hundred students from 12 schools are spending their summer holidays taking part in a Nanogirl programme, doing a new experiment each week at home.
Knowing that many of them might struggle to access basic tools at home, Dickinson helped pack hundreds of boxes of stationery to make sure a lack of resources didn’t stop anyone taking part.
The programme is an expansion of a 50-student pilot, which gave Dickinson insight into some barriers to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for kids in low socioeconomic areas. The cluster of schools involved already has digital access sorted, so the students upload photos and videos of their experiments to their school blogs.
One student’s reluctance to blog during the pilotmade Dickinson consider the messaging for the summer programme.
He didn’t want to post his video for an experiment about weight because he used cans of spaghetti, and he was embarrassed about people seeing what he ate at home.
So the summer programme features a video at the beginning about how everything in your house is useful, ‘‘and it’s great that you’re resourceful’’, Dickinson said.
Nanogirl is a social enterprise, and the summer programme for low-decile kids is funded through a ‘buy one, give one’model. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same as the subscriptions available off the shelf.
A lot of the time when they’re working with low-decile students,
that means going offline because families don’t have internet access.
Not having scissors at home is one challenge, but the biggest barrier to kids getting into science is that they’ve made up their mind by about age 12 – and at the same time, primary school teachers say they feel ill-equipped to teach it.
There’s also a lot of intergenerational fear around maths and science, she said – when a parent tells their child they were bad at maths and hated it, it gives the child permission to not try.
To tackle that attitude, they include parent cheat sheets with every programme, so parents know what to ask their kids and can answer their questions.
It’s the feedback Dickinson gets from kids thatmakes it worthwhile, she said. ‘‘It’s enough to make you cry. The kids come to us and say I never thought I could – but now I realise I can.’’