Girl Scouts Embraces STEM and Adds New Badges
girlscouts.org
girlscouts.org
Young ladies face a cultural up-hill challenge with STEM expectations. Girls are told, for example, that they shouldn't bother with video game construction, but instead should learn knitting. As a parent, I have first hand experience with well-meaning social institutions that actively discourage science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Girls do not come to Scouting to learn about financial literacy and cybersecurity. They come to spend time with their friends, to be outdoors, to have parties, to do craft-y things.
In an enthusiastic environment, my 7 year old daughter and her friends enjoy MIT Scratch just as much as the boys. She's very into her transaction journal where she records her allowance income and outgoing expenses, adding up the numbers weekly with a new account balance. She likes to take her microscope outside to look at bug wings, etc.
Which is just as true for Boy Scouts.
That's true—like in the schools! But, since girls aren't getting the support and the role models that they need there, it's good if they're at least getting them somewhere.
While I can't argue with the sentiment, I think that this is unnecessarily dismissive of the efforts of teachers (as opposed to administrators or politicians), most of whom do not bear the blame for the current de-prioritisation of education. Certainly I got both support and role models in school, and it was from excellent teachers; and I can't believe that there are no such teachers left.
If my kid shows an interest in a thing I will support him in that, but I will never push him. Recognition comes from being exceptional, not for being able to open a command prompt or writing a Hello World app.
Hey who knows. You're probably right. I'm probably right. That's parenting. I try to facilitate his learning by letting him play. It's how I grew up. And yes, I'm not that naïve that I think I can give my child my childhood.
He's a human being, and a human beginning. As such he must (and will) find and tread his own path. My job is to show him how exceptional his path might become. His job is to choose the degree of exceptionalism he desires.
See, there you have provided a push :) For anyone else reading, it doesn't need to be complicated or overbearing to still be a push. Think of it like mass-ejecting material from an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It's a slow process, but the asteroid is still an asteroid, and it doesn't explode and destroy life on the planet.
Edit: It might crash into something else though...Good luck!
The tricky part is that sometimes you have to push a bit to expose them to something out of their comfort zone. Take learning a musical instrument, as an example.
The first couple of months of learning an instrument aren't a huge amount of fun (for most people). It's legitimately frustrating. IMO, it's okay to push your kid a little bit. For example, make the child take at least 3 months of lessons with two different instruments, of their choosing, and if at the end of that, they still have no interest in learning an instrument, okay, that's fine. We can move on to sculpting or painting or programming or origami or gardening or dance or whatever.
The point is that kids are discovering the world and to a large degree, don't really know what they like or don't like yet. You have to expose them to a lot of things to find something that resonates with them, and at times, you may have to push them a bit, to get past the initial hump of awkwardness or frustration. I think that's healthy and responsible.
That doesn't mean you should force your child to take 10 years of violin when they hate it. I think a lot of parents fall into the trap of trying to force their kid to enjoy hobbies the parents enjoy or hobbies they think their child should enjoy. It's fine to start with those (hey, why not), but ultimately you have to listen to the child and understand the difference between temporary frustration and permanent personality incompatibility with some activity.
I was one of those kids who hated guitar and piano lessons for years as my parents pushed me into them. I was never very good and hated practicing but nowadays, I really wish that I had taken it more seriously. There are so many uses for my time now that I can't bring myself to commit to learning a musical instrument from scratch but I crave the creative outlet of playing music. My parents' approach to many such subjects was the complete opposite to their approach to programming, which started with the guidance and material help of an IT admin from my mother's university even before the first music lessons. They were completely hands off and I was all the better for it, but I can't help but think that if maybe they had combined the two approaches to music, like they did by hiring a really good teacher for painting & drawing, I wouldn't be lamenting the way the chips fell.
The company http://playhorrorgames.com is doing everything they can to bring this story to life, and make sure that if you're playing the game, you become part of the game.
It's a difference between "pushing unwanted interests on a child" vs "pushing the child's effort for interests he already desires".
The result of the first type of push is the child resenting her parents' forced violin lessons that she hated. (E.g. Tiger Mother's youngest daughter rebels.)
The result of the second type of push is the child's gratitude for his parents because they pushed him out of bed to make swim practice because he wanted to compete in the Olympics. The parents didn't push the love of competitive swimming on the child but they once that desire was identified, they helped maintain the child's discipline for training.
Earning badges for your achievements is socially important if you take part in Scouts. Having badges for STEM subjects helps with the sort of stigma you are talking about by normalising them alongside less stigmatised activities.
Maybe the solutions is to send your daughter to a school/organization that teaches programming, not an organization that has always taught children crafts and outdoorsy things.
I don't have knowledge of the existing badges though. Certainly, Financial Literacy doesn't sound very outdoors-y :-)
It's a great opportunity to teach basic accounting skills. Simple stuff: summing costs, figuring out which costs are shared by the group and which ones individuals should be responsible for, planning ahead for forms of payment. More advanced: amortization of big expenses across N years of trips (and related cash flow issues), parameterizing cost calculations over weather conditions and terrain, doing all of this in a spreadsheet so that when we do the trip next year we can change some values and know immediately how much it'll cost, etc.
Could you elaborate more on this? I'm curious, since I was a scout in a different context (time and culture wise).
Requirements for badges will change, but the local unit has a lot of control over its direction and purpose.
If a girl-led troop wants to explore this option, get out of the way and make it happen. Otherwise, as you were.
As a Scout up in Canada, I vastly prefer the non-gender-segregated approach Scouts Canada takes. They've even openly welcomed LGBTQ members for some time now [1].
It would be pretty shocking if they didn't in this day and age.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/dont-clap-just-yet-bo...
That is such a strange thought to me. I joined boy scouts for camping, but I also went to special events where I earned merit badges in stem topics. It probably occupied less than 10% of the time of my total scouting experience, but it was great in that it exposed me to topics and career paths that I may not have found otherwise. It would be wrong to completely replace campouts with lan parties, but that isn't what this sounds like.
And I'm not sure it's a bad thing to have activities for kids that are not 100% STEM focused. I think you don't push STEM by pushing STEM at a young age, but by encouraging curiosity, exploration, reasoning, etc.
There are lots of results for googling ["personal finance" "home economics"] and ["financial literacy" "home economics"]
> Financial Literacy badges prepare girls for a financially sound future.
This seems exceptionally progressive.
Showing a similar badge does exist in the boy scouts since a long time is relevant, because it shows that it's probably in line with scoutism.
Anything that successfully shows STEM can be a "girlish" activity (literally in the sense of something girls do) is to be applauded; and hopefully this effort, in a pre-existing mentorship structure, will have a knock-on effect wherein older mentors (I don't know what they're called in the Girl Scouts) can serve as direct examples (of women in STEM) and as positive role models.
(Might be wrong on this, it's been at least a decade since I learned that)
> (Might be wrong on this, it's been at least a decade since I learned that)
And Canada. UK has partially-gendered scouting, but the boyscout organization becomes co-ed after a certain age, the girl side can remain separate indefinitely. I think it's somewhat separated in México as well, they have more different associations though, AFAIK.
I think most countries which have scouting organizations have a gender separation.
UK Guiding allows girls and young women, but fully supports gender self-identification: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/making-guiding-happen/policie....
Scouting and Guiding in the UK are refreshingly progressive organisations. Source: current Scout leader.
Please substantiate this.
> there's enough of those
Name one that isn't a sports team.
It is more likely that both would expand to include all kids rather than they merge.
If you read through the BSA oath and law, you'll find a lot of subjective words. "Loyal" (to who?). Friendly (to who?). Obedient (to what law/rules?). Brave (in the face of which adversities?). Clean (holy shit is this a loaded word in Christendom... official BSA position as recent as 2012 was that homosexuality is "unclean" -- a position that IMO completely undermines the entire oath by opening every entirely subjective word up to politically motivated interpretation). "mentally awake and morally straight" are obviously totally subjective.
GSA uses similar words, but do they mean the same thing? I don't think so. As national organizations, I think the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are trying to support/develop/foster fundamentally different types of people. These national politics are often, but not always, mirrored in local troops.
FWIW, I do agree that scouting should primarily focus on outdoors activities and irrefutable moral goods mostly disconnected from the culture wars (don't lie/cheat/steal as a general rule; understand how your government works; be a helpful force in your community).
And it does seem like things are slowly moving that way, as national organizations realize it's not in their best interest to inject themselves into culture wars. And a lot of troops have always managed to do exactly that. But others (e.g., my bsa troop as a child) spend a lot of time on religious and social indoctrination.
So, BSA and GSA really are different organizations with different goals, because all the words their missions share are totally subjective, and each organization interprets those subjective words differently. At least at the national level. And those differences are mirrored in many localities.
I don't like math, probably as a result of terrible scarring experiences in elementary school. But I still love technology and coding. We need to allow girls the flexibility to learn about all of stem and find out what will provide for 70+ years of happiness and productivity.
Software is a form of expression.
The two are vastly different forms of expression.
Personally I don't think that Art should be part of the process for a STEM degree.
That said, it benefited Steve Jobs and Apple greatly to merge the two.
No, it's applied mathematics. You could argue that mathematics are "art" but then you would need a really wide and probably useless definition of "art" as almost everything would be art.
I don't think that everyone (maybe not even every mathematician) would call math an art, but I think that it can be done without doing undue violence to the term. For me, what makes mathematics an art is its capability for creating and exploring unusual, surprising, sometimes delightful patterns, in visual and other senses of the term. I'm not sure I'd call that a definition of 'art', but I think that it's not so broad as to be meaningless.
(A quick Google for "math is art" turns up many other (probably better) arguments along the same theme. Here's one: https://hackernoon.com/mathematics-is-art-all-the-mathematic... .)
Totally fine if that's not you.
A craft is something you get better at by improving the constituent skills that are required in that craft. For instance, in woodworking, it takes some level of skill to work with hammer and nails, or to sand a board, etc. etc.
So programming is not a craft.
Programming, at its core, is problem solving, and getting better at programming requires improving one's problem solving ability. Physics is also about problem solving, and is likewise improved by improving one's PS ability.
However, having heavily experienced both, I would say that they are very different types of problem solving. Modern programming is a lot of trial and error, ala any other type of "invention". "I did not fail, I now know 1000 ways to not make a lightbulb" - Edison.
Modern physics is not really trial and error. Physics is applied math. You take some fundamental principles, combine them together in a logical way, and get something new. At a high level, that sounds like programming. But for me personally, and I think for many people, the fundamental thought process and approach to problem solving in the two fields is very different.
If you follow Uncle Bob's TDD methodology, it becomes much less so.
Come to think of it, Photoshop is the same way.
If I'm editing a headshot for a pageant contestant (which I've done quite a bit in the past), that's firmly in the "craft" side of things.
If I'm putting together a UX design for a webapp, what's a bit ambiguous - there are design elements that are "craft-like" and there are usability considerations that are "science-like".
If I'm writing a droplet to do batch processing of a whole series of photos I've take on a shoot and have to test that it's doing what I need it to do over a wide variety of inputs... well, we're back in the "science-like" side of things again.
In fact, I would argue that the toolset and even the discipline are almost irrelevant in this discussion. "Craft" versus "science" is a matter of process and mindset more than anything.
Gender equality is important. Critical, even, given society's propensity to marginalise and objectify women. But gender emancipation should not come at the cost of emasculation.
I disagree. In fact, I think this kind of stuff is very harmful for development.
Imagine telling someone that they need "white-only" time, to unburden themselves from the special requirements imposed by hanging out in mixed company. It only serves to perpetuate out-sized notions of existing differences between genders.
> gender emancipation should not come at the cost of emasculation
Your compassionate/benevolent/mild/well-meaning sexism is still sexism.
I'm curious if you can come up with a definition of "masculinity" that doesn't exclude women from basic human virtues and duties.
Boys and girls (at least the majority of them) behave and socialize visibly differently, and can benefit from it. Races do not have the same sorts of inherent distinct needs, and if they do it's typically more granular than "white" or "black"; more likely you want time with the Italian side of your family, or the Somali side, or with your girlfriend's Panjabi roots.
Why do you think so many women occasion a "girls' night out", or men "hang out with the guys"?
Boys and girls have a lot more significant physiological and sociological differences than whites and blacks. Whereas, for example, the noticeable differences between a Japanese woman and a Mestizo woman come down to things like whether the earwax is likely dry or oily, or the probable size of teeth or lips. These sorts of things have basically no relevance or importance to social relationships.
Drawing meaningful distinction between the cohort characteristics of boys and girls is not sexist. I have no interest in determining the rights or freedoms of either group based on these characteristics. I would merely suggest that people in either cohort are likely to have needs that differ more than within each cohort. A hen and a rooster are both chickens, but they are meaningfully distinct as well.
Cultural momentum. They inherit the habit from older generations. May as well ask why Swedes love saunas, or why asian cuisine uses chopsticks.
My friend crowds have not had anything resembling those segregated nights out in forever, and in fact, headway is being made insofar women have men in their bridal parties and vice-versa.
> These sorts of things have basically no relevance or importance to social relationships.
You haven't made a case for why the physiological differences between men and women have relevance.
Forgoing the natural biological propensities that genders (and races) have is much more harmful for development and for this society as a whole. Start seeing reality for how it is, not how you wish it to be Roderic.
The biological makeup of men vs. women is a lot more distinct than a one race vs another.
Firstly, there is the most obvious: sex organs and growth. Erections, ejaculation, periods, breast/hip growth, etc. are all sensitive topics, and I have not seen evidence that keeping these topics sensitive is a bad thing. Girls generally hit puberty earlier than boys, so it doesn't really make sense for 12 year old boys and 12 year old girls to be grouped together in certain situations, when girls are having a sexual awakening and boys aren't (as a cohort - obviously everyone hits puberty at different times, but society functions through generalizations).
Secondly, there is the general impact of hormonal differences. Hormonal differences have a striking impact on emotional development, and that needs to be considered when raising children.
Biologically, the only general difference between a black boy and a white boy is their skin color, which at an individual level makes no difference at all to their development. Obviously if society treats these skin colors differently and that impacts development, that is another issue entirely and should be handled separately from any gender issues.
I have a buddy who's been a scout from youth til college, and the net impact of gender-segregated scouting in the USA vs. most other countries in the world is that american kids were clueless and out of place at the global jamboree he went to, since other countries have correctly obsoleted the stupid divide.
If puberty is a salient point for you, maybe you need to group slightly older boys with slightly younger girls. However, before that, you'd need to justify why these developmental differences matter at all for the vast majority of socializing kids do.
And ultimately that's my problem with your post. You are very scared about the idea that some of these cultural gender barriers may be torn down, and you have some biological facts in hand, but you haven't actually made a case for why these biological facts necessitate the erection of cultural barriers. The burden of proof is on you, despite the american status quo lagging behind.
I'm not really sure why American Scouts would be clueless about girls, considering that almost all of them go to schools with girls, participate in other clubs with girls, etc. etc. If they are not interacting with girls, I think that is more a failing of their other social activities, not a failing of the scouts.
Fundamentally, I think the idea is to have some aspects of life / growing up where sexuality can be largely ignored in pursuit of an arguably more constructive environment. i.e. teenagers have a whole lot of hormones, and focus is easier to maintain when you're not thinking about a tumble between the sheets with the person sitting next to you. That's just how our brains are wired.
"Different races are strange for kids, it may cause them stresses firing off their innate biological danger senses, maybe best to keep 'em separate if the other task at hand is too important"
The only thing required to challenge the status quo about a discriminatory practice is the absence of proof. I don't agree that I need to do extra legwork just because I want to change things up.
However, I'm Canadian. And in Canada, scouts don't discriminate. So I don't really have to do anything, other than explain that the American attitude towards this seems very backwards to me.
Gender/sex is different. Sex is quite possibly the most important indicator and impactor of adolescent development. For example, mixing genders absolutely makes sexual behavior more accessible (mixing races does not).
From there, studies have linked increased sexual behavior in adolescents to increased delinquency[1] and strong negative impact on grades for white males (and less inclination to go to college for white females)[2]. The body of work surrounding this topic is still somewhat small, but I would be happy if you could provide a source that indicates increased sexuality has a positive net impact on the productivity of adolescents, or anything to that effect.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-006-9128-4 [2] http://www.jstor.org/stable/2786919?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
What I'm saying is that higher levels of testosterone in men increases their competitiveness and appetite for risk.
Depriving boys (and men) of an outlet for that competitiveness is folly. Expecting men to take up crocheting just because equality is folly.
I support giving men and women equal opportunity. I support any individual's choice. If a boy wants to play with other boys who are we to interfere? If a boy wants to play with girls or crochet, who are we to interfere?
FORCING equality, equivalence and absolute parity onto women and men will lead, I think, to societal problems. Androgynous sameness. History, and experience, has shown me that anything in the extreme is a recipe for disaster.
Who knows. I may be wrong (I've been wrong before), but I have yet to hear a compelling counter argument.
This amounts to trolling whether you intend it that way or not, and predictably sparked a tedious ideological thread. That's emphatically not what HN is for, so would you please not post like this again?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852819 and marked it off-topic.
> connect girls to favorite science topics like video game development
Finally, im sure you could drop them a "scientific" task, and watch the number o interested persons drop to zero. Science can be horrifically tedious, i remember those experiment/measurement serieses my grandfather let me do when i was enthusiastic about chemistry in my childhood.
One afternoon, of unexplained science drudgery, (a repetition of radiactivity measurments) killed my interest for chemistry back then. So horray, for taking people by something they naturally care about at that age (Games) and by that hook interest something that makes them grow.
Is mathematics a science?
How about mathematics within a pre-defined discipline (e.g., doing novel work on group theory without inventing new axioms/structures)? Is that science?
If you include mathematics in the sciences, which I think we should, then it's hard to see how video game development is non-scientific.
(Besides which, the old trope about AI applies also to science. AI is AI until it becomes useful, then it's no longer AI and becomes some other branch of CS. All of engineering is science until it becomes useful, then it's no longer science but some branch of engineering.)
> video games is largely more of an engineering problem that typical science/exploration.
For one, video games are a great way to understand the strengths and limitations of simulation in science. And basically all fields of science these days have a corresponding field of computational science focused on using simulations to better understand the underlying science. So, it's important.
No, it's purely analytical, not empirical. Mathematics provides essential tools used in science, but is not science.
(besides which, there are some obvious problems here -- not least of which is that many sciences rely on mathematical objects in probability and statistics to determine what is and is not true about observations. IMO modern science is inseparable from mathematics, and concrete mathematical objects form most of the philosophical substrate of modern scientific practice... so, if "science" is separated from "mathematics", that's only the case in some primitive high school understanding of how modern science is actually performed in reality. Maybe that's a problem with how science is performed in reality, but AFAICT it seems to be working pretty well in most areas with some notable huge exceptions.)
If it was Boy scouts is introducing sewing, cake making etc. The response would be along the lines of, that's great in theory but in practice boys just won't join Boys Scouts anymore.
I'm not really against the STEM push in Girl Scouts I guess, I'm indifferent to it. Maybe it'll get a few more women interested in the field which is cool.
You can bake lots of stuff with a campfire and a dutch oven.
It's impractical.
* There's a brand of dutch oven endorsed by the Boy Scouts of America
* Scouting magazine has printed many articles with recipes for dutch ovens https://scoutingmagazine.org/category/outdoors/cooking/dutch...
* Boy's Life magazine runs articles about cooking in a dutch oven
Its the dad's with fragile masculinity and out-dated opinions that would stop them going or teach them that those activities are 'girly'.
How did society get this way if it's all a construct? A secret cabal decided what constitutes a "masculine" activity and what constitutes a "feminine" activity, some indeterminate amount of time ago?
If I only like playing with toy cars because my father liked playing with toy cars, and my father only liked playing with toy cars because his father liked it, who was the first father and why did it stick?
The reality is that men and women have different biological compositions with different hormones and different instincts that organically give rise to different behaviors. Sure, toys are toys, and generally any kid will probably be happy with any toy, regardless of gender. But the idea that preferences in childhood development didn't arise organically is honestly not founded in reality.
BSA cooking merit badge: http://www.scouting.org/filestore/Merit_Badge_ReqandRes/Cook...