DECtech has been piloting a new idea of involvement this semester where students who already stay after school join our sessions remotely. One teacher stays after school with these elementary students, gets their supplies for our activities and helps them during the activities. The students participate during the lesson part, but are given the opportunity to do more of their own thing when we start the activity.
While teaching a 5th and 6th grade DECtech session, I was working with about 10 girls total, 6 of which were in an after school program. I'm happy to say this went really well. From my previous research, there are a few reasons allowing a group to join together is beneficial. The first is the fact that one factor impacting a girls decision to do DECtech again was if they had friends participating. Therefore, by letting girls at the same school join together, they are guaranteed to know other girls in their session. Not only that, but even in an online setting they are able to work with other girls and have a teacher there to help them if they get stuck. In terms of applying this in the future, I think having after school programs where groups of girls join together would work really well. They wouldn't even necessarily need to stay after school for it, we could also just encourage girls who are friends to join meetings together by going to each others houses. We could even offer a "bring a friend to class day" to let more girls join sessions for the first time. Then if a friend who hasn't done DECtech before enjoys it, they might sign up during another semester.
How important is it to kids to have friends participating in the same activities? Well, in the reasons for discontinuation of DECtech, 12.7% of parents said it was because their daughter didn't have any friends to attend the session with. Additionally, 32.3% of parents said that friends attending was a factor impacting their daughters decision to rejoin DECtech. This was the second biggest factor impacting girls decision to rejoin only after their schedule of other commitments. That puts friends attending as a more important factor than times offered, topics offered, and the quality of the program offered. Clearly, this is a huge factor that must be acknowledged and prioritized.
Not only that, but when our sessions are in person and a girl has a friend from the same school to attend with, they can carpool to Mines together. This minimizes the difficulty of getting girls to campus, which 20.6% of parents said was a reason for their daughter's discontinuation with DECtech. This was the second highest reason listed for discontinuation only after their daughter's schedule being too busy. Additionally, continuing to offer virtual DECtech sessions could remove this hurdle completely for some parents. I believe the combination of both in person and virtual DECtech sessions would allow our STEM outreach program to reach the most girls.