STEM Girl

Creating the next generation of Pakistani female change-makers by sparking scientific curiosity through storytelling, technology, and female STEM role models.

The STEM Girl project is creating the next generation of empowered Pakistani female change-makers by sparking scientific curiosity through storytelling and women in STEM role models. Disseminating 21st-century skills through STEM-based project learning environments, the STEM Girl certification equips students in Intermediate studies i.e Grades 11 & 12 with the skills they need to share their knowledge with other creative minds in their community and beyond.

The complete STEM Girl certification program will comprise of 3 different levels as follows:

Explorer: Lvl 1, Innovator: Lvl 2, Storyteller: Lvl 3

Based on the three categories under 21st-century skills, learning, literacy, and life (Stauffer); each level on the accessible mobile app will explore a category through STEM role models’ stories and practical life projects. 

After completing a level, users will receive badges for the completion of it, and with the completion of the final project, the final program certification will be awarded. This along with a closing ceremony to celebrate the achievements of each cohort.

The STEM project will also focus on engaging college teachers, the Inter board, and other STEM foundations in Pakistan, along with STEM experts from all over the globe - mainly women in STEM.

In Pakistan, where 17 million girls aged 15-24 reside (UNICEF), less than 10 percent of engineers and technologists are women (Pakistan Council for Science & Technology) & for other STEM fields, women constitute only 18% (Qureshi, 2018), which is alarming. 

Girls feel insecure going into STEM fields due to gender stereotypes and bias, male-dominated cultures and fewer female role models leading to a staggering gap in STEM exploration by females.

Living in Pakistan as a young girl myself, I saw a world where economic instability due to the pandemic led to larger drop-out rates from schools mainly by the girl child, where traditional stereotypical mindsets limit the potential of girls, where girls are married at an early age, where technology is only meant for boys, where beauty is the only thing that define a girl, and where STEM opportunities are rare.

In 2018, the percentage of female adolescents (aged 15-19 years) not in education, employment, or training was 42.9%. (UNICEF) which has worsened even more due to the pandemic. In 2019, the completion rate for girls in upper secondary education school-age (Grades 11 & 12) was 23.3% (UNICEF) showing that factors like child marriages and stereotypes stop young girls to continue learning and pursuing a profession - often in STEM.

Young girls have the power to bring change in the world, but when opportunities to grow and explore are not available for them, they are not able to use their talent.

The STEM Girl certification program will be a first-of-its-kind innovation focusing on creating the next generation of female changemakers in Pakistan. Currently, female students enrolled in Intermediate (Grades 11 & 12) in the pre-medical, pre-engineering, and computer science fields only have access to bookish knowledge and are not able to transfer their knowledge to others due to lacking the core 21st-century skills needed to do so. A certification program that will equip these girls with 21st-century skills via a project-based learning environment will enable them to effectively use storytelling and technology as mediums to share and explore complex STEM concepts. 

The reason why we’ve initially chosen young girls studying in government high schools is that many of these young girls belong to low-income households.

Now more than ever, it is important that women and girls are empowered to bring change to the world and explore how they can use their skills for social good. Not only will the project help support young girls into STEM through storytelling and technology, but it will also empower a whole generation to be changemakers using the power of exploration to change the world.

Educating girls empowers them with knowledge which in turn allows them to gain self-confidence, independence, goals, and dreams, contributing to the empowerment of communities at large. Because when we are able to empower young girls, they act as catalysts and advocate with knowledge in their respective communities.

I am the founder of Global Creative Hub, a social development initiative that empowers young people and teacher educators to gain 21st-century skills through various training programs. Based on the feedback and results from our 100% female-focused training programs that have impacted 500 young girls to date, we were able to identify problems faced by young girls interested in venturing into STEM. These problems would be classified into two themes, one being the importance of female role models in STEM, and the other being the need for an accessible and engaging solution to build soft skills. 

The method used in mostly all of the training programs at GCH would revolve around a short pre and post test, feedback forms for each session (if multiple), takeaway resources (varied for each program), and awarding a badge on the GCH platform as a reward. But what I found is that there was no robust platform or solution available to truly measure the skill competence for each level that suited to the young girls we worked with (straightforward MCQs were not a viable option)

That was when I came up with STEM Girl, and as a young girl that belongs to the same age group as the solution target group, I was able to build the prototype with first-hand experience along with insights from other youngsters during the ideation and prototyping stages.

STEM exploration by girls to eradicate the gender gap in STEM fields that is caused due to a lack of female role models in the fields, no practical life learning, and STEM-based stereotypes. Our solutions will be the first to provide Pakistani girls with an accessible and engaging way to learn while also enhancing 21st-century skills.

The STEM Girl solution is currently in the prototype stage as we have already gone through many of the stages (and iterated as well!) in the design thinking framework i.e: empathize, define, ideate, and prototype. The solution has an interactive prototype which is being tested and improved with each feedback cycle. The solution also requires the development of content and character design of the app avatars (female in STEM role models)

At the core, the STEM Girl solution focuses on a mobile application that will leverage the power of artificial intelligence. Starting from a pre-test to identify areas for improvement, the app will recommend personalized learning activities in a gamified and accessible environment where female role model characters will guide the users to learn about different concepts in STEM while enhancing their 21st-century skillset, progressing through each module to receive level-based certifications. 

Throughout, there will also be the option for users to gain detailed insights into their learning progress thanks to AI technology. Alongside, the app will also be utilizing two important technologies:

1. text to speech technology (read aloud feature)

2. Offline mode (to help users learn whenever, wherever)

Both of these are steps to aid the users and make the application more accessible.

The solution has not been launched yet, the expected number of girls we’ll impact after the launch of the solution will be around 4000-5000. As we believe in the ripple/butterfly effect, these girls will be impacting at least 5-10 people around them, leading to an enormous impact on the overall community.

Initially, we will be focusing solely on girls in government high schools, with plans to expand the program to girls in private high schools that offer Inter and high schools that offer A-levels.

• Disseminate 21st-century skills via STEM-based storytelling that will increase the rate of female STEM explorers in Pakistan, with an aim to decrease the gender gap in STEM representation.

The main aim of the certification program is to empower young girls (3000 initially) to become the next generation of empowered changemakers in Pakistan. Young people have the potential to bring change in the world and work for people and the planet. When we are able to create an environment that fosters creativity, exploration, and the necessary 21st-century skills needed for them to become scientific explorers and innovators, we will be able to bring radical change. They will be able to utilize their skills for social good by sharing STEM knowledge in an engaging way with other curious learners. 

With the contribution to building a scientific explorer mindset in female students,  an engaging curriculum featuring inspiring women in STEM will help students learn through practical life experience and then disseminate the knowledge acquired with other members of the community, resulting in a ripple/butterfly effect. 

When certified, they will be motivated and eligible to use their skills to teach other students STEM subjects in a meaningful manner and will be encouraged to transfer their knowledge to others. 

Bring a shift in the curriculum and empower every young girl to use her acquired knowledge for their community and society, and not just to pass an exam.

We currently are measuring our progress in terms of research and development. As for measuring the progress of the project impact, the following indicators are what we will be striving towards:

UN SDGs 4,5, 8, 9, 10 & 17

Techniques that will be utilized.

1. Insights from anonymized learning dashboards 

2. User feedback data

3. Expert insights

4. Progress levels and completion rate per level

5. Special event-based learning modules i.e: Environment Day, Women’s Day, etc

6. And many more

The foremost is finance, to make the STEM Girl project successful, finance is the main barrier as I am from a developing country with a high inflation rate & I belong to a middle-class household.

I do not wish to burdanize my parents with financial matters, therefore the funding from this challenge will be really great help for me to make this project come to life and impact other young girls in my community and hopefully beyond.

 Otherwise, I have the energy and passion to make the project happen.

About the Team:

Amna Habiba is a 16-year-old Pakistani, founder of Global Creative Hub, international speaker with more than 50K views, STEM enthusiast, and an advocate for girls' education and digital literacy. Recipient of Young Achiever Award & runnerup for Young Voices Award, featured by UN & Malala Fund, spoken at World Bank, UNESCO, IFC, and more; she is passionate about using digital for social good and the UN SDGs. In December, she celebrated her birthday by launching the #STEM16 campaign.

Quratulain Hussain is a lecturer at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Karachi,CEO of Global Creative Hub, a girls’ rights and peace activist, she has over a decade of experience volunteering and working with at-risk youth in Pakistan. Recipient of multiple scholarships, she is a MOOC facilitator, mentor, and has recently finished a project on teaching resilience for teachers from 10+ countries around the world.

Why Us?

I believe that my team has the right skill set to execute this project because of the extensive experience we have leading GCH and organizing multiple large scale events - 3 hackathons, training programs, etc

I bring to the table insights and experiences as someone in the same age group as our target audience.

And Ms.Quratulain brings in her expertise and extensive experience as a teacher educator working in education for more than a decade.

Current partnership with Department of Teacher Education, University of Karachi for developing content and gaining insights into making this an impactful project.

The STEM Girl project qualifies for the HP Girls Save the World Prize due to the following reasons:

• Led by a 16-year-old girl

• Under HP’s commitment to digital equity

• Features female STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) role models that inspire young girls to become activists of change in their respective communities

• Has special module-based learning environments based on real-life examples to help solve the world’s most pressing problems like climate change 

• Accessible and user friendly

• Climate-friendly - based on a mobile app and eliminates the need of paper applications

If selected for this Prize, we will use the funds to make the STEM Girl project possible and pledge to impact at least 3000 girls with the innovation

The STEM Girl project qualifies for the Pozen Social Innovation Prize due to the following reasons:

• Led by a young social activist

• Addresses the need of empowering girls into STEM exploration

• Provides girls with the skills to build a better and more bright future for themselves

• Creates more female role-models in STEM

• Helping create the next generation of empowered changemakers in Pakistan

If selected for this Prize, we will use the funds to make the STEM Girl project possible and pledge to impact at least 3000 girls with the innovation