NY school combines tech and dance to groom female engineers

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An all-girl public school in New York encourages its students to go into the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), by fusing the disciplines with dance.

The Young Women's Leadership School of Astoria's (TYWLS of Astoria), Andrea Chaves said it was her goal to get as many students as possible interested in the fields of science and technology.

Chaves is the school's "STEAM" creative director, mixing science, technology, engineering and math with the arts.

Three years ago, Chaves came up with the concept of "Digital Dance," which pairs student dancers with coders to create a multimedia extravaganza with more than 70 participating students this year.

This performance by the students is aimed at readying them for a career in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. /Screenshot via Reuters

"Our girls love to dance. So I was observing that those girls were not doing the technology," Chaves told Reuters last Friday during a rehearsal.

Chaves was already heading a technical class where she coached interested students in coding, graphic design and filmmaking. When she tried to find a middle ground for both groups, things clicked.

"In my mind somehow one day I just had an ‘aha’ moment and I said, 'oh my God we could create a digital dance,'" she said.

This year the "Digital Dance," tells the story of three friends trapped inside the world of video games.

The show uses rover robots, dancers on hover boards and blinking ghosts from Pac-Man, all coded to sync with music and dance by students aged between 11 and 17.

Chaves said that the school offers coding classes to students starting 6th grade, as she sees it as a language skill like French or Spanish.

"If I know another language I can put it on my resume and I am more valuable," she said.

The show uses rover robots, dancers on hover boards and blinking ghosts from Pac-Man, all coded to sync with music and dance by students aged between 11 and 17. /Screenshot via Reuters

Students say the coding classes for the performance made them more confident.

"I am not really into technology but when I did that, I was like 'wow.' When I learned how to Photoshop and things like that I was like 'wow, I can really like take this subject,'" 15-year-old Mireille Knox, who learned to code last year, told Reuters.

Tania Najnin, who programmed a rover robot in the performance, said she was inspired to pursue an engineering career after learning how to code at school.

"It's not going to be hard unless you make it hard for yourself. So I decided that you know this is what I want to do in my future. And to girls who think that they can't do it, they definitely can," the 17-year-old high school junior said.

According to the US National Science Foundation, women remain underrepresented in the science and engineering fields.

While women make up half of the college-educated workforce, less than 30 percent of science and engineering jobs are filled by women. The biggest gender gap is found in the engineering field, with only 15 percent of engineers being women in 2016, according to the foundation.

Source(s): Reuters