State woman receives national STEM award
MILFORD — Can you build a car? What do plants need to live? How do wind and water affect land?
Those are just some questions that are part of the second-grade curriculum unit of Little Scientists, a youth science curriculum created by Milford resident Heidi Gold-Dworkin. Its goal is to provide science education to children through hands-on learning. Little Scientists has reached over 10,000 children worldwide, according to the company.
Gold-Dworkin recently received a STEM Trailblazer 2020 award for her contribution in a STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] field. The award was presented by STEMconnector, a research services company through its Million Women Mentors program.
She said she first thought of the idea for Little Scientists 30 years ago to help answer the many questions her daughter would ask as a toddler.
“She began asking questions that all young children ask such as ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and ‘Why are the leaves turning colors?’ I looked for ways to explain the science simply to her,” GoldDworkin said.
She said while she was comfortable teaching at the college level at Yale Medical School, teaching science to a 2-year-old was a whole new challenge, she said.
The Little Scientists program gives customized instruction for children in pre-k to eighth grade, based upon their age. Once she created the program, she began offering it at the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.
“I would do one a month and it would take me a month to design
the class,” she said. “The following year, I offered the program as a weekly enrichment class and people were coming from different parts of the state to take this class.”
As a mother of four, GoldDworkin said she can relate to all other working mothers — especially those in the science field.
“As a woman, it has been difficult to balance a career and be a mother. That’s been a challenge and that’s one of the reasons why I took a leave of absence as a scientist from Yale when I was pregnant,” she said. “There’s a lot of pressure to eat, breathe, talk, walk, science if you wanted to make it on that career path, and at the time there was only one female science professor at Yale.”
She added while it has been a long struggle, she thinks there will be change with a female vice president.
“Now that Kamala Harris is going to be in the White House. It breaks that glass ceiling in terms of women being able to reach these career goals and have their husbands supporting them in these roles that traditionally were only males.”
But if opportunities for women in STEM fields have been limited, children from lower income families also have faced obstacles. Two years ago, Gold-Dworkin created a nonprofit organization called Great Science For All to provide science educational opportunities for children from underprivileged backgrounds.
Great Science For All helps students by sending them science experiment kits so they have the materials to enable them to do the experiments along with teachers, according to Gold-Dworkin. She said she has been doing a lot of work in New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, and Waterbury public schools to try to engage those children in science.
“I grew up in New Haven and went through the New Haven public schools, so I was really familiar with the disparity in educational opportunities for children from low socio-economic backgrounds,” she said. “Personally, to me, it’s really important that we give them the opportunity that they can go out and have the skills to be successful in their jobs and their career. For them, it’s their way out of the cycle of poverty.”