In a college classroom in Little Rock, about 20 high school girls hunched over piles of Lego blocks on Thursday, their faces concentrated and serious.
They made up half of a group that traveled from all over the state for the Girls of Promise Coding Summit, a free, half-day event the Women's Foundation of Arkansas puts on twice a year to encourage girls to improve their skills in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, subjects.
"STEM isn't just a girl or a guy in a lab coat," Anna Beth Gorman, the foundation's executive director, said. "We really try to do a better job of unpacking what STEM is so a girl gets excited about it instead of discouraged."
In the auditorium of the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College, Gorman asked girls to raise their hands to indicate where they were from. Several had woken up before 6 a.m. to travel from Mineral Springs, Van Buren, Pocahontas and south Arkansas.
About a third of the girls raised their hands when Gorman asked if they were taking computer-science classes at their high schools. Some of the girls had attended a previous two-day Girls of Promise conference in the spring.
Gorman said the event gets different kinds of engineers from companies such as Acxiom Corp. and AT&T to volunteer and talk to the girls about their career paths.
"A girl who's from Pocahontas, Ark., can look around and say, 'There are a lot of girls like me across the state; look at all these women,'" Gorman said. "And so she's aware of opportunities that she would never have thought about for herself."
In one room Thursday, half the girls bent over laptops and worked through a programming exercise that allowed them to create a calculator. The instructor, Terence Cox, illustrated the concept of programming -- giving instructions to a machine -- by having them shout simple directions to get Cox to move across the front of the room and open a door.
"I've never actually coded anything, so I wanted to see what to do," participant Denaya Rogers said.
In the other room, instructor Lennon Parker encouraged the girls to be creative with Legos, explaining how it helps build skills in math and engineering. He held up one girl's Lego house, pointing out how the strong foundation would support its height.
In 2015, an initiative from Gov. Asa Hutchinson made Arkansas the first state in which every high school and charter school must offer at least one computer-science course.
"Arkansas will become a national leader in computer-science education, and we'll be preparing a workforce that's sure to attract businesses and jobs to our state," Hutchinson said in a news release when the law was passed.
With the rising number of career opportunities in STEM fields, Gorman said she doesn't want girls to be left behind.
"We want women in Arkansas to be stronger financially and to be economically dependent on no one but themselves," she said.
Metro on 07/28/2017