The word ‘fun’ completely sums up the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) workshop that myself and another 23 girls participated in.  Two women from Newcastle University, who have a degree in Stem, came into the school to teach and to inspire us - to consider pursuing a career in stem.  Although it’s not for me, the way that they presented this area of study, certainly had a big impact on lots of the girls.

At first I wasn’t too excited about the workshop, I had never really been interested in stem, but as the workshop progressed, I realised that I was wrong. I actually really liked it and I’m sure all of the other girls did too.

During first lesson, we learnt some new things about stem and stem careers. We did this by completing some activities. We had a timeline on a whiteboard with lots of historical dates and on the board, at the front were the events that had to be placed in the right year. There were 15!! After doing this task, I realised that my memory was not the best, as I had learnt about these things in the past but had forgotten them. Luckily for me, my 3 friends that were in my group had fantastic memories and we managed to score 6, which was one of the best scores.

In the second lesson, we matched some of the jobs that you could achieve with a degree in stem, to the descriptions of them. It was quite hard but we got most correct. We then played a game, where you dealt cards of different colours, with different names of stem jobs on them. You had to pick one colour (not telling anybody what it was) and ask ‘do you have a certain job’ for example sports engineer and if they did, they had to give it to you. It was very competitive, but in my group, nobody achieved a victory, as we were very good at stopping each other from winning, even though we weren’t very good at winning.

Once we had eaten lunch and had third lesson as normal, we were back. This time we worked with partners to escape from an island; we used our imagination! We completed multiple tasks such as solving codes, figuring out Latin words and building a shelter out of limited supplies. Building the shelter was my favourite. We only had a few resources to use, which meant the shelters were very small and could only fit insects in but everybody thoroughly enjoyed it. One set of partners made, what looked like, a palace and it was fit for a king and queen. A king and queen insect.

We all thoroughly enjoyed this workshop and learnt many new things, all of which will come in useful.

By Charlotte W., Year 7