 Today we get to hear a wonderful presentation by Melissa Kasbreed from UNO. She's talking about, as you see on your screen, using YA fiction to build interest in STEM with teen girls. So I'm going to turn it over to Melissa. Your microphone is unmuted, so we should be good to go. Oh, I should say if you have questions for her during the presentation, go down to the interface of GoToWebinar, and there's a thing that says questions. If you click on that little button beside it, you can type questions into that box, and I'll be watching that so I can ask Melissa your questions as we go along. Thank you. Sorry about that. Go, Melissa. Okay. Thank you, Sally. And thank you to the Nebraska Library Commission for inviting me to talk about this idea of mine. And it's because it's given me motivation to develop it further, and really has piqued my curiosity about this topic. And I thought I would start by explaining a little bit about how I got to this idea. A few years ago, I was with the UNO Chris Library, and I did collection development for small children's and small young adult collection. And so I was always paying attention to those headlines or videos, things where they would go off and talk about, these are the best books to get your kids interested in STEM or get your kids really excited about math with these books. And so I'd go and I'd look at them, and they were always nonfiction. And it's not that I don't love nonfiction. I really enjoy a well-written nonfiction book, because I would have a fiction book, but I just really felt that if we want to inspire kids, we should have fiction books in those lists as well, because I noticed when kids and teens would come to me, and they would say, oh, I love this book, it was very rarely a nonfiction book. It was always a fiction book that just got them excited, and they loved it, and they wanted to talk about it. And so I sort of made a point of starting to keep an eye out for books. Then the fiction, where there was a science element to it. Now, I am teaching for teacher education, and my focus has shifted primarily to young adult, because I'm teaching a young adult literature class, and I need to read a lot more young adult literature, so I've switched to that. But I've also just started wondering, okay, is there more to this? And so I started doing a little research. And there we go. Sorry, I didn't have control of my slides for a second. And I found this wonderful article by Clark Blickenstaff, and in it she notes that it's not that girls and boys aren't exposed to science differently. They're actually taught it and experience it in equal numbers through elementary school and high school. And when we talk to them in high school, they talk about their intention to pursue STEM majors, classes, and college. However, once they graduate from college, only 20% of the students in the STEM degrees turn out to be females, turn out to be girls. And it's just like, what's the happening? What's the difference? So she went and she reviewed 20 years of literature. And this literature was everything from actual studies questionnaires, experiments to just writings where people were wondering out loud or talking out, writing out loud rather, I guess, about what this possibly meant. And as she went through these things, she discovered that there was a pipeline, but it was very leaky in terms for girls. And so she looked at all these different things, these nine, and she kind of went through each of them, checking them off and asking herself, well, is this really true? Is this really relevant? And building up an argument there. And as she goes through these in this article, I started noticing some threads of something that kind of sparked a tone in my head or something that linked back to this idea I had for collecting these books with a science STEM kind of feel to them. And as I'll go through these quickly, but I noticed for the areas that sort of got my attention, I have bolded them and got ahead of myself here. I have bolded them so you can see those and made them a little larger so you can see them. But I'm going to go back a slide here because I do think it's important to say, why does it matter? Why does it matter that we find these books with female protagonists who have an interest in STEM or STEM is a big part of their life in some way? And that's because of our future and the future of these young women. Projections for our workforce show incredible growth in the areas of STEM, especially engineering and computer science. If we want to prepare our young people for the future and being productive citizens, we need to prepare them for those careers and those skills. And to do that, they've got to be interested. They need to do that. At the bottom, you can see the wage gap. We talk about the wage gap often, but a lot of it goes back to the careers women are choosing. So if we have more women in STEM careers, they will earn more than women in non-STEM careers and we can potentially deal with the wage gap. And then additionally, there's just the basic idea of innovation. We have all heard the stories about heart attacks and how after years and years of saying, we all need to pay attention to these certain symptoms for a heart attack, we discovered that those symptoms and those guidelines were based on studies that only looked at men. That in fact women experience heart attacks in a very different fashion and have very different symptoms. And it was simply because women were out of that research science arena. Also, things like early voice recognition like Alexa and Siri, they were originally not calibrated for our voices. And so like I still swear at home, our Alexa responds to my husband more than she does me. Maybe I need to lower my voice. But they're left out of this innovation. Airbags were originally designed for males because males were the ones designing it and they were testing on themselves and each other and they were the ones in the room. There were only women in the room where these innovations are occurring. So back to the reasons. Now some of it is biology and they say, oh, it's brain size. Well, there's not really a difference in brain size and actually some very famous male scientists had small brains. I think Einstein was one she mentioned. Now there is something to say about the spatial abilities and when they tested teen girls and boys for their spatial abilities and they looked at the top 10%, there was a 2 to 1 ratio of males to female in that top 10% that scored highly on spatial abilities. But that's not the same as the 20 to 1 ratio we see in our classrooms and like architecture classes in other areas where spatial abilities are an issue. And they note that spatial abilities are something that can easily be taught that a simple training session can teach someone to expand and grow in their spatial abilities. So that can be easily mitigated. Preparation. Girls are prepared just as equally as boys but they drop out in significant numbers in college. So it's not that they're not getting prepped. The girls who even come from schools who have a science focus drop out in significant numbers once they get to college. Now an attitude, this is where I started to see something and I think it may go back a little bit with the preparation. When they talk to boys and girls in high school about their future and how they see themselves and their future careers even though they have an equal interest in science, girls don't see themselves as scientists or less likely to see themselves as scientists. They have the interests there but when they think of their future, science is not part of that equation. Now it also goes into role models. So maybe this is role models. They're not meeting women in STEM to see so you don't have those role models except in medicine and you see the numbers of women in medicines, doctors and so forth are pretty equal and are growing and that's not in that area but in other areas when they look at the female scientists the teen girls have this sense that successful female scientists are less likely to have children and for a young girl who looks to her future and plans to someday become a mother and wants to become a mother, this could be very discouraging. So well, okay, I can't do this even though I have the interest because I want to be a mom and I put my priorities on having children someday. In curricula we look at success and female students can be successful in physics especially if it has an algebra-based approach whereas male students are more successful if the approach is calculus-based. Well, most of the teachers are male so they're teaching what they're comfortable with, the calculus-based, which serves other males rather than the female students who would be interested in algebra-based physics and then we start getting a little bit more into those teachers where when they look at teachers and they give them the same assignments just sometimes they have a boy's name and sometimes they have a girl's name on them that if the assignment is done by a girl they have lower grades even though it's the same assignment there's that perception there that is influenced there. They also notice on those same assignments that they give less feedback to the female students. Additionally in the classroom that teachers when they were talking about the different students they had higher expectations for the boys than they did the girls in their classroom. Additionally, follow that up when we looked at the assignments the students were turning in if boys did not follow the rules or the directions for the assignment they were rewarded because they were doing original work but if girls followed the rules they were downgraded because there wasn't originality or the sparkle was the word that was used sparkle because they were doing what they were told and so you've got sort of that little mixed messages stuff happening there and again there's that conflict with cultural pressures with cultural pressures and girls feeling like they need to still grow up and become parents and that's wonderful but that they can't do that and have a career in science there's that conflict and it's too much plus when they look at science in science research you just don't see females very much as we talked about earlier with the innovations so as I looked through all these things I kind of went so it's an image thing and I started wondering about is it really about an image and the image we have and the image we communicate and the message that are picked up by our young girls so I found this article by Hill Corbett and Saint Rose and it talked about and highlighted different studies that looked at how can we change that image and little different things can do that such as a study where they showed a video it was animated animation and the character or the narrator was a female engineer and just something simply as that having that and having teens girls exposed to that increased their interest in STEM there's also this idea of a growth mindset where so many girls and I don't just hear it from girls but so many people say oh I just can't do math I just don't have a head for math and it's like no it's not a matter of that that math is a skill that you can be smarter at if you just work at it and if they actually believe that then they are more likely to succeed in STEM and pursue STEM it's just the idea that it's just something you practice at like anything else you can get better you will get better and it's not this thing that you're either born with this talent or you don't have this talent and we get off of that idea that we can lead to this girls being more involved in STEM additionally girls need to feel like they're contributing and see a purpose to this if they don't see a purpose in their work then they're less likely to go into this which is why we see so many women in the medical sciences doctors because they can see a purpose they see how they're contributing to their communities this way but a lot of STEM careers are kind of behind the scenes the engineers you never see them out front or the computer programmers they're always in a back room I think a lot of our tech people here on campus are stuck in a basement you don't see these people contributing to what happens but you don't see them and so then you don't necessarily realize that they're contributing to society so again it goes back to this image how do we see this and can girls see themselves and reconcile that with each other for Clark Blickenstaff all these different things and these leaks and holes within the pipeline led her to come up with this thought that there's not one solution to be able to tackle this with this one easy fix and I believe that's true but I wonder if libraries can play a part of this with one facet of it can we help the young women see themselves in STEM by using the literature that was written for them the literature that they get excited about because we saw this with Hunger Games I don't know how many news stories I saw with people going girls are out there doing archery now because of Hunger Games I saw a little bit with the movie Hidden Figures where they're talking about girls I love the one down there with the girl with the screwdrivers and such in the protective eye where we saw a little bit with this of girls becoming more interested in math and that so can we build on that from that so again I went back to research and literature and I found these articles and they talked about the emotional piece of reading and when we're reading and the imagery that we have in our minds how it creates empathy and pro-social behavior as you see here on one of the titles but it also just gets into our head and we put ourselves in the shoes of those characters it's not like TV or the movies where we watch them we're just watching them and we're inspired by them but in books we're in the minds of those characters often we can put ourselves in those shoes of those characters and if those characters are interested in science can we then somehow see ourselves interested in science so that's my idea and my thoughts so I really started to go out and look for these books and see if I could find them so what's going to fall from here is just some of the books I've found that have a STEM angle so to speak and maybe a few things are ways you can use them in your library either passively passive programming or active programming some things that I've found out there that others are doing or have used so this first book in the area of physics is the square root of summer and this is a young woman who has a bright future named Miss Oppenheimer of all things and she is a physics whiz the book opens with her dealing it's a year later after she has dealt with the loss of her grandfather the same time, the same day even that she lost her grandfather her first love breaks her heart and so these two very significant men in her life have left her, her grandfather helped raise her after her mother's passing he was basically a second mother for her while she was being raised also with her father and so she's struggling dealing with all this at the same time a boy from her past who was her best friend and who just sort of dropped off the face of the earth when his family moved away and she lost contact with him, he's entering her life again and so she's dealing with all this stuff and all of a sudden she's realizing that days have gone by and she doesn't remember them all of a sudden she remembers yesterday being Monday but all of a sudden it's Friday and she doesn't know what happened to those days in between and she starts putting together and she's writing this report for a teacher on this idea of theory in the area of physics and she starts playing with these ideas of time travel and equations related to time travel and quantum mechanics and she's decided that's what's happening to her that she is going and traveling in time skipping over days in order to avoid them, not deal with them because she's not remembering these events that happened and family are telling her will you trash this and she's like no I didn't I wasn't even there so she's having this sensation but as she deals with that and tries to figure it out it helps her understand her grief and her broken heart and how she starts taking control of the situation and what's happening to her and how she uses control of her future and the direction for her future all because she's figuring out this physics problem of time travel that's happening to her and while I was flipping around looking for ideas to use with this book I came across this great time travel time hop Tuesday display from Pinterest asking their teens what day would you relive what day or year of your life would you relive and this could be high tech, low tech physical bulletin board you could do padlet or lino it where people are posting their things and sharing what they did they would relive in their lives now also in the area of physics we have the freak observer and a freak observer is a concept where a self aware entity suddenly appears within a situation and they have to make sense of the chaos around them well in this book our main character Loa is dealing with loss great loss again similar to Gaudi and the square root of summer but Loa has recently lost her sister her younger sister and her family life revolved around her younger sister who suffered from an extreme illness and all their energies and everything focused on her young sister well her young sister has died and now the family has fallen apart because their focus is gone money is tight mom's working odd hours everybody's angry they don't know what to do with their their anger and their sadness over the loss of the young daughter also about the same time Loa loses her best friend in a hit and run accident so she's dealing with a lot of trauma while she's in a physics class where they have to do a report on the freak observer and she talks I love this quote where she talks about floating in the cosmos in the space and trying to observe what's going on and so again physics is helping her assimilate the problem helping her understand what's happening to her happening in her world and getting control of her world and this idea of observation is constant through a lot of these books as I talk about them you'll hear them observation is a big common denominator and so if you want to do something in the library that relates to STEM that you can pull in with these fiction books there's a lot of citizen scientists opportunities online that you can do in this case Galaxiesu because you can go online it is so simple I couldn't believe it I participated and I have no background in astronomy or physics or this area of science but this organization has millions and millions and millions of images of space and objects in space and they need help classifying them and they started doing it on their own it was ticking forever so finally they decided to put it online and you can go online and I have a screenshot here what you see they have the shape they're on the left and they want you to tell what kind of shape it has what features does it have you know is it a star and then there's little help screens to help you to find what is smooth what is not smooth then you can do that so it was very very simple to go in and just look at these images and identify them and click help to classify them so you could easily have an event or a night where your teens come in and just share with each other how they're doing this and participate in the science themselves within the cosmos and understanding their own environment and universe computer science was another area and I wanted the computer science books for me had to be more than just you know they're on the web their gamers or something like that that they actually had to demonstrate skills and I haven't had a chance to re-work across I just bought the copy of it so I'm excited to look at this the reviews have been very good but the description is Amika this is a future world where the war cross game has international taken the globe by storm and people are just constantly playing it and there are folks who illegally bet on this game the main character Amika is a bounty hunter that's how she makes money to help support herself and she's a bounty hunter to track down these people who are betting illegally well she gets the attention of the creator of the game who wants to enter the game as a spy because he thinks he's got cheaters there's some stuff going on and he wants to catch them of course she does this and gets into this it's a chance of a lifetime and suddenly she realizes not all is as it seems so that's war cross Illuminae this is a very different telling in computer science it takes place out in outer space in a mining colony on another planet and so this planet is being mined illegally and another mining company wants this planet and it has attacked this planet bombing it heavily trying to kill all the occupants because they don't want any witnesses to what they're doing is told from the perspective of the documents involved in the investigation of the attack on this planet so it's filed reports by government agencies it's the text files of text exchanges email exchanges transcripts of audio recordings and audio exchanges back and forth with folks and as you read this report of what happened on the planet two characters come out while Katie and Ezra and Katie and Ezra have broken up at the very beginning of this just before the attack occurs and as it goes through and they're escaping off the planet with three spaceships the rest of the survivors they're being followed by this other company because they don't want any survivors and they want to attack their spaceships it is Katie's skills as a computer with that really saves everyone and her skills as a computer with is also what's led to the breakup they broke up because Katie wants to leave this planet she wants to go off to university and become this great computer scientist and be involved in the universe whereas Ezra likes it where he is he doesn't want to go he doesn't want to leave the planet it's home he feels safe there he doesn't want to go anywhere so they've broken up but it's clear they still love each other from the transcripts now they support each other but it's really Katie in the end through most of the book who dominates and she is the hero of this story and it's her skills and her computer science skills and her hacking ability and her coding ability that really are what drives and saves the society secret coders by Yang this is for a younger set and I know I said young adult but I just couldn't resist this so if you've got some young middle school kids that you kind of group in your YA activities this would be great for them even maybe some advanced younger readers and that but I really love this series and I'll be honest I didn't think I would I always speak when someone intentionally trying to convince me to like a subject I'm just like you're trying too hard but he doesn't try too hard Hopper is this young woman she has to go to this new strange school that's really weird and the birds have like multiple eyes and the turtles you can see the turtle there has like lasers shooting out of his eyes so something really going on and she meets some new friends and they discover that this school is actually a giant computer and it's figuring those things out and into the plot Yang has incorporated actual puzzles that are coding that teach the basic underlying features of coding and foundations of coding and you go through these puzzles and I couldn't resist trying to do these and figuring out turning the next page to see if I was right and I finished the book and the book ends the first book ends with the puzzle and I was like oh I got to get the second book so I can see if I was right and I was and so I was really surprised about the enthusiasm that this built up with now we do a lot of things in libraries with coding you know coding camps and things like that for kids if you wanted a low-tech thing there's this wonderful group called Math Think out of the United Kingdom and they have a video here and a website where they talk about how you can make a non-tech computer out of dominoes that if you watch this video it talks about how they've built this domino structure you know by pushing the dominoes down that can do math that can do basic calculations so like 2 plus 6 being 8 so if you push the 2 line and the 8 line after all the dominoes fall you'll see the answer of 10 and how to do that and then their website they have all these things to help you build that domino structure such as this is the bullion ore and how to create an ore with dominoes this strand or this strand and do that I just thought that was amazing to watch that video and see how they actually could do that in a very non-tech but very visual and tangible way. Environmental Sciences was where the bulk of these books come from this is Calpurnia Tate Evolution and Calpurnia Tate which probably if I'm honest planted the seeds of this idea of science in fiction Cali is this young woman it's like 1899-1900 and she's in Texas and she is very interested in more than just dresses and going to the debutantes parties and things like that and not being raised to be just your typical wife and mother in the future she wants more and she starts becoming closer to her her grandpereal grandfather who's very interested in the sciences he is a devotee so we say of Darwin and origin of the species and he notices her noticing grasshoppers and the big the yellow grasshoppers are very big but the green grasshoppers are really small so again this idea of observation and she is able to figure out well the yellow grasshoppers are really big because they blend in to the green grass that's in their yard the green grasshopper stand out so they're easily caught and seen by the birds who eat them up before they can get very big and the grandfather notices this and he encourages her observations of nature and science and together they have discovered a new species of veg which is a flowering plant for those of you don't know and they go through the paperwork and the steps of the scientific process to establish if this is a new species or not and to get it registered and classified with the scientific community and so you see her growing and becoming a scientist and that continues in the book the curious world of Calpurnia Tate and again at the same time she's doing all this she's finding societies pressures to think well you have to be a mom you can't do that and be a mom and the pressures of her family to just be a typical girl and not do these these boy things and forest will forest world excuse me my margarita angle we see to a brother and sister and I want to emphasize margarita angle and her works because there's always a strong sense of the environment and nature in them her background is a PhD in biology she actually taught in the agricultural sciences in the universities and a university in California so she always brings that to her work and in forest world it's a brother and sister who have been separated the boy has been raised in Florida with his mother and the girl in Cuba with her father and events have happened where the boys being sent to Cuba to live with his family now all these years in Florida he did not know he had a sister and so he comes to Cuba and suddenly discovers he has a sister and Edward the young boy is very interested in the sciences Louza his sister is not she's interested in art but as they come together and develop a plot to try to draw their mother back to Cuba she starts an appreciation for the sciences and understanding and begins observing and it becomes more and more of her art where she's representing the natural world in Lye Tree we have a wonderful tale in turn of the century England soon after Darwin has published Origin of the Species and Faith has arrived with her family to this small island in north side of off the coast of England where they are avoiding a scandal they've left London because of a scandal and they're coming to the small community because her father has been asked to consult on a dig and they move there and he's carrying with them this plant that he hides and he guards very cautiously and he gets there well the scandal has followed them there and people are not trusting him and one morning his body is found this community thinks he has committed suicide but his daughter Faith believes he was murdered now Faith has always had an interest in the natural sciences wants to grow up and work with her dad but again her mother and her father don't think that's a proper thing for a girl so she's always done all her learning in secret teaches herself Greek so she can read the scientific papers of her father and things like that well she sets out to find out who killed her father and she uses the scientific method to do so and so you see is she's processing this information and she's investigating this she's using the scientific method to do so and at the same time she's learning about this tree this plant that her father has been guarding so closely and it is a lie tree and the idea of this lie tree is that it feeds off lies so if you tell it a lie it will grow and it will bear fruit and this fruit if you eat it will give you visions that reveal the truth so she uses it and lies and the scientific method to unveil her father's killer there are so many environmental science citizen science opportunities out there on the web there's the frog watch the bud burst where you just look at the plant life in your local community and observe it again observation and you observe it to see when it first pops out of the ground when you first see the bud when you see the bud open so they can watch the change of the plant life in response to the changes in weather and what that means the great sunflower project is an effort to pay attention to the bees the pollinators in our community that have been dying off at such great numbers but paying attention to them and where they are and what plants they're using in order to save them and the things you can incorporate and just easily involve your teens in I'm going to start talking really quickly now because I'm watching the time and I want to leave time for questions math we have higher geometry and Zen diagram higher geometry set in the 1950s where Anna the main character is just loves math is a genius at it really works at it wants to take this and go off to the university but again it's the 1950s and she's out of place because everyone else thinks she should just get married and raise kids there's sort of a romance in this well there is a romance in this but it's not the drive of the story Matt supports her he's not a bad guy he's actually an artist and he's not where he's supposed to be either people don't think he should get a real job not just artistry and so it's really is she going to follow her dream of math and go on rather than it is about the romance and diagram this is really all about the romance the main character Eva is a math genius she tutors students mostly athletes in math so they can stay on the team and play in sports now she also has this psychic ability where if she touches someone she sees fractals fractals of their emotions and for most people they're very dark they're very negative their tears what makes them angry, their anxieties and so she avoids touching anybody even her parents she can only touch her young siblings who are three and her best friend who is like the happiest person on the planet unbelievably innocent they're the only people who are safe for her to touch so she avoids touching everybody except someday she meets this young man athlete named Zen and she inadvertently touches him and she doesn't see fractals so there's a little bit of a mystery about why that is but there's also the romance involved Seneca Rebel Melissa? Yes I just want to interrupt a second to let you know while we usually go for about an hour you can go longer I know your time might be needed somewhere else but it's okay if you go longer is all I wanted to say well thank you for that I want to be respectful of other people's time too though but I appreciate that so I won't feel too guilty if I go a little longer than I planned because I have some great books here that I want to talk about Seneca Rebel I'm just in the middle of this right now so I can't quite tell you how it ends but again math and the role math plays in someone achieving their dreams or realizing their potential is very strong in this the main character Doro short for Dorothy is another math whiz she's in school the school really kind of holds her tight because she is the one who keeps their math scores up she's at a poor school, it's falling apart they don't have a lot of tech the other schools have and this is a future society where tech is a big deal it's just her and her mom, her father has passed away have you noticed how many parents die in these books but it's just her and her mom the resentful of this role the school has put her in in being this math whiz money is also tight at home so she used her math skills to sort of take advantage of gambling sites around the world and has figured out an algorithm an equation where she can go in and gamble online and win and so she set up this program where she's setting aside all this money well she gets caught and the authorities come and get her well this has also gotten the attention of this secret society and the secret society is out to save the world the world is falling apart environment is corroded there's poverty, there's hunger all these things are going and they have created this world underneath the surface of the planet where they have brought together the best and the brightest brains to come in and solve these problems and she has offered the opportunity to go live there and learn there of course there's always a catch you know it's very competitive and she can't tell her she can never go back home she can never see her mom again she can't talk to her mom again her best friends anything like that well she decided to pursue this because it's her future she can do this but she also believes she can do this to help her mom and figure out a way to bring her mom to this place and have her mom with her here but it's her math skills that are getting her there there were so many different things to do with math but I came across this wonderful organization that's actually it's a husband and wife out of the United Kingdom where they have developed knitting patterns around mathematical concepts so if you look to the bottom left of your screen here there's sort of a tree figure that's a Pythagoras tree and where all those black triangles represent the Pythagorean theory you know hypotenuse squared plus side squared plus side squared plus side squared equals hypotenuse squared and so that's that's the exact size of those triangles in this knitting pattern you see the Fibonacci sequence just up to the upper left of that as well as binary code in the checkered blue multicolored thing there the hexaflexagon cushion all knitting patterns so it's kind of a low tech way to bring math in there and knitting has become so popular it's a way to maybe build on that popularity as well as peak an interest in mathematics in mathematics science and math forensic science stocking Jack the Ripper this is part of you can see James Patterson there on the top of the cover James Patterson series of authors is set during Jack the Ripper in London and the main character her mother has died so she's with her father and her brother they're in a certain level society where it has expectations of how she behaves and how she dresses and how she's acts but she has apprenticed herself to her uncle who is a pathologist for the city of London and is helping the police try to catch Jack the Ripper science is a refuge you know her mother died from this illness she has no control over life there's a lot of uncertainty and confusion but science for her is certainty you know 2 plus 2 is always 4 you know that she relies on that it gives her structure it helps her control her world make sense of her world her father of course is very against this and so in addition to trying to track down who Jack the Ripper is and help her uncle do this there's a side romance he has to deal with her father who doesn't want her to do this by the end of the novel though her father has come around and he realizes her potential and he realizes he can't hold her back anymore which is what leads to the second book Hunting Prince Dracula and I'm just realizing I should have capitalized Prince there the professor in me is going ugh I read this one the Hunting Prince Dracula it just came out I believe last month or the month before but her story continues where at the end of stalking Jack the Ripper the father has recognized her talents and her interest in the forensic sciences and says okay if you're going to do this I'm going to send you off to this university in Central Europe or Eastern Europe so you can develop these skills and learn these skills further conveniently the love interest going off to this university so they'll be going off together and I'm assuming that's the locale for the Hunting Prince Dracula book there are tons of forensic science activities but for Prince for stalking Jack the Ripper and Dracula it seems like the blood spatter activities were really appropriate where you just make flake blood either from corn syrup or tempera paint or whatever and this teens can learn how height impacts the size of the spatter so you can start guessing where attacks came from and where people were standing from that angle impacts the shape so you know what direction things came from fingerprinting how you can lift fingerprints from different surfaces there are just so many different things that are easy to do with just stuff you find at the grocery store you know easy low cost things to put together to work with this and build a complimentary program to the fiction book geography this just came out as well so I haven't had a chance to read it but the script description talks about the main character's goal Camzin is her name and her goal is to follow her mother's footsteps as an explorer and map out these unexplored regions so it's cryptography she wants to create maps like her mother did from what I can understand so it's a fantasy novel here it's a girl wanting to reach her full potential and follow her mother's footsteps there are so many mapping opportunities for those who are interested in geography and cartography the humanitarian open street map program is where they want volunteers to go online looking at satellite images and helping them identify what those objects are here just recently on campus at UNO after the hurricane in Puerto Rico where so many buildings and roads were just devastated the red cross was asked the humanitarian open street map organization to open this up where volunteers could go in look at these satellite images and identify where buildings were supposed to be or where roads were supposed to be so the red cross could then organize and prioritize what parts of Puerto Rico they needed to start with and how they needed to proceed from one area to the other and this was a mapathon event we had on campus people could drop in for 20 minutes an hour whatever they had computers set up where you could just go through and easily very little training involved outline these objects and identify them as buildings or parking lots or roads whatever they were so then the red cross could go forth and do the work they needed to do. Chemistry. I don't know if you can ever be Lori Hulse Anderson for her excellent writing just fabulous with catalyst she has structured the book you can see a piece of the table of contents there around the idea of chemistry and these different aspects and elements within elements no pun intended within chemistry and so for like the sex chapter there you see 2.2.1 base that's where she talks about her mother and the foundation and the base her mother was for her family her family her mother has passed on as just her and her dad and her brother and she is a science whiz Kate has dreams of going to MIT because that's where her mother went she wants to be like her mother she is only applied to MIT and the science group and the science geeks and what I really love about this book is the science kids are not necessarily isolated as the nerds or the geeks they are just as popular as anybody else they are not considered weird in any way so they're just like any other kid and I love that about this book it's also set in the same school as her book speak and there's a small nod to the character from speak but this is really Kate's story about her dreams of going to MIT just like her mom and how she deals with the family unit of her dad and this other family that her dad minister has adopted after a tragic event and adjusting to that and then what happens if she doesn't get into MIT like she wants and how is she basically this is about her using chemistry and her desires to be a chemist and figuring out her future and using all that together just to grow up this is your standard coming of age story but it's so beautifully written and so wonderfully written and there are so many different easy you know kitchen type projects you can do in a library, borax, snowflakes do sun printing on t-shirts or scarves, elephant toothpaste with hydrogen peroxide where you got things foaming all over the place and how different types of pills dissolve in different in vinegar and lemon juice kind of like how they dissolve in your stomach and understanding those things and even using red cabbage to test the pH levels within different liquids so there's all kinds of things that you can add to this idea of chemistry and what's happening with chemistry here engineering really quickly this takes place during the sun of Sam and the main character Nora is she just really succeeds in excels in her vocational tech classes she knows how to make things and build things that stand and while the story is really about her dealing with her family situation where it's just her mom her brother and her and her brother is becoming increasingly abusive to her mother and to herself and as she goes through this and learns to deal with them you realize and she begins to realize that these skills in vocational technology and her ability to build things are going to be her path to break free of this abusive environment and move on reach out for her future and achieve in her future there are just so many engineering things you could do I made this little cart thing with a paper clip box paper clips and straws where I could wheel it across my desk here so there's so many different engineering things you can do there's a website called teachengineering.org where they talk about different activities that you could easily do skateboard crashes in your library or just outside your library maybe instead designing a new sport around a disability and what kind of equipment do you need for that new sport basically it's the problem solving how do you look at your situation create something to deal with that problem which is what we see Meg do and burn baby burn and I want to emphasize as we come to the end here and Sally shouldn't have told me I could go a little longer because I did but anytime you have a mystery book is an opportunity to teach the scientific method because every mystery goes through where someone has observed something and that raises the question which they go out and research they interview people they read diaries and stuff like that and then they come up with a hypothesis of what they think is happening and then they have to test it to figure out who really did it or whatever and then they decide in the conclusion were we right or were we not right and then they have to share that information hopefully they share that information with the police so anytime you have a mystery you can teach the scientific method and you can easily do that with a bulletin board you can do that in a group discussion setting where if you have a book club and you can form the discussion around the scientific method and how it follows this path additionally there's an organization at Tufts University called Novel Engineering and they have this process where they take any tension filled text which is pretty much any young adult lit book and it has anxiety and angst look at the problems they're facing design a solution build a prototype for it and test it so if we look at something like burn baby burn you could address the problem where Nora's worried that her abusive brother is going to steal her money that she earns from her grocery store job solution can you create an alarm system can you build a better lock for her door can they camouflage a hiding place and build something where they can hide something in there so they could be building these things in your library within your maker spaces against stuff just from probably the grocery store or a junk drawer dump out a junk drawer certainly mine junk drawers and then build prototypes to do these things to solve the problems phew talked really quickly there I just want to finish here with some observations that I have from reading all these books in all of these books I've noticed these three things one of it that science is one of two things it's either a tool that the young women are using to make sense of the world and what's happening in the world and to comfort them in their world or science is their ticket to get out of town they're ready to move on they've got a situation at home that they don't want or maybe they aspire to something bigger and greater than what their hometown can offer them and science is their way out of there science is their way to achieve so those two messages are very clear within these books the other thing I would say is there is a distinct lack of diversity in these books now I haven't quite read them all so I'm hoping I find more in the the few that I pointed out that I haven't read but other than burn baby burn and forest world there is not a lot of diversity or representations by underrepresented groups so that's one of the things I hope to is I continue this path and this investigation I hope to find more of those books and more of those things so we can reach out to even more girls okay hopefully I did leave a little time for some questions the slides are available at this URL here and a PDF of this whole slide so if you want to see the books and any of the links to any of the websites that I indicated you can find those there and we will also put the slides on the archive for this presentation if that's alright with you Melissa so you could access them absolutely great yay and we'll get out those websites that you had throughout I think we can pull some of those out and make them on another list by the slides so you can just go there to grab the URLs that's what I'm not going to do that though Chris is going to do that so okay does anyone have any questions for Melissa about what she talked about I love to hear about those books and I read Catalyst when it first came out and I went into a chemistry class in high school looked around looked at the walls and went and changed it to Spanish and you know if I'd read Catalyst before I got there I think I would have stayed in that chemistry class so it's just scared me that the big poster of the whatever that table is the something or other table see the periodic table right yes and it is intimidating but then in this books you could really see the comfort and the handle they have over that and just because of that growth mindset that we talked about at the very beginning that if you practice you will get smarter in this yes and I know I did really well in Spanish and I like Spanish but I would have done pretty well in chemistry I believe at this point in my life I can say that right another thing I notice being an observant person is you have a very unique desk and I'm envious oh I actually decided to go to another room so I'm meeting I'm doing this from one of the group study rooms here in the ideas room in the education building because the lighting was really weird in my office and I was having a phantom of the opera effect with the light so I tried to come some place else with better lighting gee we could do a stem thing with phantom of the opera couldn't we totally disfigurement and his okay sorry that's okay this was wonderful and I so appreciate you being willing willing to present this again so that other people in Nebraska and other states everyone is welcome to go to our archives and take a look at any of the programs that are have been recorded right now it's all listed in chronological order so the most recent one will be the top one on the archives list after Christus saved saves it there and we are working toward having search mechanism so you could search on the topic and and have those pop up instead of just scrolling down rows and rows of a long list of different titles so someday that will happen that's great just a minute where we have I'm excited to read these books wait whoops there we go and share this with teachers in my school thank you for presenting oh you're welcome I hope that I hope you found some treasures of some things you can use and if anyone has suggestions for me books I should read please let me know because I'm continuing to read and I hope to kind of I haven't quite figured out what I will do but some sort of output of where of bibliography or something of additional titles to fit each of these subject areas so suggestions are welcome please oh thank you so much we really appreciate your time here and I'm looking forward to hearing more about what you've been reading and what direction you're going and also seeing a list a continued list I should say because you have a list right here and I'm not seeing any other comments so I'm going to let you go because your time and other people's time are important and just once again thank you so much and please tune in next week if you're able to attend live that'd be great and otherwise look in our archives thank you Melissa thank you thank you very much for the opportunity goodbye everybody I'm going to just let's see stop the recording