Club empowers girls to ‘do the science’

Seventh-grader Koya Siebie held a magnifying glass close to a love letter sealed with a kiss. She tilted the paper and magnifying glass at different angles to get a better look at the lipstick print.

“Would you say it’s a light shimmer or a dark shimmer?” Koya asked the other girls sitting near her in a science lab at Inman Middle School in Atlanta.

The girls were trying to solve a fictional mystery: who was sending love notes to the captain of the basketball team?

They compared the color of the lipstick on the notes with samples from each “suspect.” They measured the height and width of each lip print. They separated the different lipsticks into its components to see the color bands, a process called chromatography. Each suspect used a different brand of lipstick so the girls could determine which one matched the love letter.

The girls belong to GEMS (Girls Excelling in Math and Science), a weekly after-school club started by science teacher Kelly Schlegel. She said she started the club this school year after noticing the boys in her classes were more outspoken than the girls and took greater control over the experiments, forcing girls to the sidelines.

The club allows girls to work without any competition from boys, Schlegel said. Experiments center around girls’ interests so that they understand math and science can be found everywhere, she said.

The Inman program is part of a growing national effort to increase girls’ interest and confidence in math, science and technology with the hope that they pursue careers in these areas. Nationally, women earned about 28 percent of the doctorates in the physical sciences and 21 percent of those awarded in engineering, according to the 2007 Survey of Earned Doctorates conducted by six federal agencies. Schlegel runs the club with help from a professor and students at Georgia Tech. About 30 middle school girls attend each week.

“This is fun because we’re doing math and science instead of just reading about it,” seventh-grader Jasmine Foreman said. “Because there are no boys, there aren’t any distractions because no one is shouting. They wouldn’t want to be here anyway. What we’re doing is designed for us, not them.”

The girls suggest club topics and soon they will design rockets, experiment with genetic engineering and study nanotechnology, the science of engineering on the atomic and molecular level. They create podcasts —- audio and video broadcast over the Internet —- to set up and explain the experiments.

The girls in the club chose to work on the mock love letter mystery or two other imaginary crime scenes. One described a supposed drug bust at the school where several people, who were found with suspicious white powder, became “suspects.” To find the criminal, the girls analyzed handwriting and fingerprints and tested the suspects’ urine and various powder substances for drugs.

The other supposed crime imagined that pop star Britney Spears had been found dead, with a gun in her hand and a suicide note nearby. The girls were told to determine if it was a suicide or a murder and —- if it was a murder —- who did it. They analyzed hair, fiber, blood and fingerprints found at the scene with samples from the suspects. They also compared the suspects’ handwriting samples with the suicide note.

Meanwhile, Koya narrowed her list of suspects to solve the first mystery.

“If you’re patient and just do the science, you will find the answers,” she said. “But what makes it so cool is that I’m the one doing the science. I’m finding the answers. Who knows what I’ll solve next?”