- GWC across the nation:
- GWC by University of Michigan Women in Science and Engineering:
- Middle and high school students
- Email Victoria Alden at vial@umich.edu
- GWC at University of Michigan Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics:
- High school students only
- Email gwc.bioinfo-requests@umich.edu
- Visit http://umich.edu/~girlswc/
Here you will find educational resources developed by Girls Who Code at the University of Michigan Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics for Females Excelling More in Math Engineering and Science (FEMMES) Capstones. These materials are geared towards 4th-6th grade girls.
Our Binary Bots activity uses Blocky Games and Ozobots to teach conditional statements (if, else if, else) and base2 to base10 conversion. Content development by Zena Lapp and Marlena Duda.
Our activity is a revised version of Choreography with Code from Fall 2017. We have added a component using Ozobot with content development by Marlena Duda, Zena Lapp, Alex Weber, and Brooke Wolford.
- Instructional Slides
- Scratch activity
- Download Scratch code
- Access the Scratch code directly
- Handout with instructions
- Ozobot activity
Our activity is entitled Choreography with Code and allows students to use if statements to control a ballerina in Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu). Content developed by Stephanie Theide, Brooke Wolford, Rucheng Diao, Emily Roberts, Zena Lapp, Sarah Hanks, and Marlena Duda.
The lesson walks through booleans, conditional statements, and operators. The PDF file does not have the animations that the powerpoint file does.
Import the .sb2 file in this repository to Scratch website following these instructions: https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Exporting_and_Importing#Importing. You can also access the code directly.
The handout defines the components of scratch and provides instructions to create a new if/else code block to change the ballerina's costume color. A .docx file is provided as well. The answer is in the final slide of the instructional slides.
Our Incredible, Edible Cell Activity was planned for FEMMES capstones before Girls Who Code was founded, and is purely biological in nature. Content developed by Haley Amemiya, Marlena Duda, Allie Bouza, Zena Lapp, and Brooke Wolford. After a 5 minute introduction to cells, we let the students view a variety of cells through the microscope and record their observations in their lab notebook. The final 20 minutes were spent making the Cookie Cell Model.
Learn about the incredible, edible cell! What’s a cell you ask? Use a microscope and examine at the many types of cells that make up your body—neurons, kidney cells, lung cells, and more! Then make your own edible cell to learn about the important components of the cell such as the famous mitochondria, the power house of the cell! Why are cells so important? They have all the instructions to make you, you and they keep your body healthy and working properly.
The slide deck walks through 5 core components of the cell and some fluorscent light microscopy images of cells.
Choose candy to represent:
- The walls (cellular membrane)
- The boss (nucleus)
- The jelly (cytoplasm)
- The energy makers (mitochondria)
- The factory workers (ribosomes) We suggest Smarties, Skittles, and Fruit Lifesavers. On plain sugar cookies have students spread icing on the cookie (cytoplasm) and place their candy as cellular components of their chosing. Explain to their neighbor what each candy type represents before eating.
With even a low power microscope you can view cell parts on slides. We recommend this kit. Have students draw what they see in their lab notebook.