High school students from Livermore and Tracy recently visited Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), bringing participants from the two cities’ Girls Who Code (GWC) programs together on-site for group activities and tours.
The event, now in its second year, is called ‘Altamont Connection.’ It included tours of the National Ignition Facility and Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory as well as hands-on activities. More than a dozen students and faculty from the two school districts participated in the unique opportunity to see science in action and interact face-to-face with Lab staff and mentors from their respective GWC clubs.
Tracy High School Principal Jon Waggle attended the event and said that, as a former science teacher and advocate for STEM education, he was excited for the chance to visit the Lab and share science in action with his students. “The boundaries of science for many students today are limited to the walls of the classroom,” he says. “Trips like these open their eyes to real-life applications—on the biggest scale—of what is in their textbooks, and that is fun to watch.”
With the day bookended by the two popular tours, students from Tracy and Livermore high schools gathered at the Livermore Valley Open Campus for lunch and two STEM-based challenges. In one activity, participants decrypted ciphers to crack safes full of treats, and in another, they created their own battery-powered, LED-lighted helicopters and had an informal launch competition.
Volunteer GWC mentors and Lab software developers Mariah Martinez and Paige Jones designed the codebreaking and helicopter activities. Each week during the school year, the pair leads Mendenhall Middle School’s GWC club, in Livermore, to coach programming concepts and design activities based on the GWC curriculum.
Spending a few hours talking STEM with the ‘Altamont Connection’ high schoolers was a different and fun experience for Martinez, who usually works with middle school students. “It’s a smaller group, so the interactions are more personal, and the conversations are more future-focused,” she says. “These are people on the cusp of important life and career decisions, so they want to know what I love about my job and what my path looked like. They’re genuinely excited to be at the Lab, and that excitement is contagious.”
Girls Who Code is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology and computer science, with a goal of inspiring more girls to become computer scientists and engineers. The organization has facilitated computer programming training for about a half-million girls, women and nonbinary individuals worldwide, according to the GWC website.
LLNL’s involvement with GWC began in 2016 as a collaboration between the national program, the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District and the Lab, before expanding into Tracy in 2021. LLNL’s GWC outreach currently impacts about 200 students in Livermore and Tracy and depends on 40 Lab volunteers, according to Computing Workforce Administrator Jamie Lewis.
Lewis says the GWC program is focused on strengthening the workforce pipeline between the Lab and the local schools, particularly among young women interested in STEM careers. As a supplementary GWC activity, ‘Altamont Connection,’ is a way of bringing diverse students from different cities together to meet, form connections, and be introduced to and inspired by the many pathways STEM careers offer.
This year’s event was moved from spring to fall to better coincide with several upcoming opportunities. The ‘Altamont Connection’ participants will be personally invited to an LLNL resume workshop in early December and then encouraged to apply to the Lab’s Early Internship Program, a unique summer internship offered specifically to graduating high school students who had previously been members of local GWC clubs.
The event was sponsored by LLNL’s Science Education Program and the Computing Workforce team, and was supported and organized primarily by Joanna Albala, Mildred Lambrecht, Elyssa Bishop, and Nikki Finnestead.
Still ahead for the GWC outreach team are two Dream Day events in March and April, which will invite middle school GWC clubs to the Lab for a similarly inspiring day of science fun and learning.
—Deanna Willis