Happy Women's Heritage Month and Happy Teen Tech Week, which the Los Angeles Public Library celebrates all year long through our Full STEAM Ahead initiative!
As part of the library's celebration of women and tech, we hosted over 200 middle school and high school students earlier this week as they listened to a talk by Mallory Lefland, a flight systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Mars Rover Curiosity project. The students and robotics teams from Immaculate Heart Middle School, the STEM Academy of Boyle Heights, the Studio School at Sotomayor Learning Academies and American University Preparatory High School also heard from First Lady of Los Angeles Amy Elaine Wakeland, as she talked about the importance of gender equity in science, technology, engineering and math careers, and Sarah Marcotte, a Community Outreach Specialist at NASA JPL, who demonstrated the capabilities of ROV-E, a demo rover made out of everyday materials.
The library's Full STEAM Ahead initiative focuses on bringing fun, hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) to patrons of all ages at branches all over the city of Los Angeles.
Upcoming programs as part of Teen Tech Week, the Young Adult Library Services Association's national celebration of tech in libraries, include Artbots, where participants learn how to make art-making robots out of electric toothbrush motors and craft materials, Scratch workshops, where participants learn graphics based ways to build software coding and programming skills, Terrarium-building, Squishy Circuits, Teen Coding Clubs, Custom Button Making, Stop Motion Animation, Lemon Clocks, learn to DJ, Make a Vacuum Cleaner, Create a Robot, Electronic Greeting Cards and more!
The full list of programs is here.
So far, from July 2015-January 2016, the library has:
- hosted a total of 507 STEAM programs, with 10,223 attendees
- received 371 STEAM surveys from youth participants, ranging in age from 4-17
o 49% of respondents are boys
o 51% of respondents are girls
o 58% of respondents have attended 2 or more STEAM programs
o When asked if they liked the program, 78% of respondents rated 5 out of 5 (1 being "Not at all!", 5 being "A lot!")
o When asked if the program made them want to learn more about science, 85% of respondents rated either a 4 or 5
We also have a great list of Women’s Heritage Month titles for teens available.
As well as additional Women's Heritage Month resources on the library’s website.
More information on Women’s History Month, including its founding, is available from the National Women’s History Project website.
You can find out more at the Women’s History Month website developed by the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
And read the Presidential Proclamation on Women’s History Month, March 2016.
So whether you’re celebrating Women’s History Month or Teen Tech Week or exploring those topics all year round, you can create it and read it at the library!
