By Gabrielle Terrett

The Vicksburg Post

The Vivian Burey Marshall Foundation held a Beauty and Brains seminar Thursday to inform girls in the fourth through sixth grades about STEM related opportunities in the future.

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and the Vivian Burey Marshall Foundation has offered programs such as the Beauty and Brains seminar for years.

The local VBM Foundation and the FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Team organized the event. Seven female students from the FTC team came together to speak to students, provided by the VBM Foundation, in an effort to nudge young girls in the path of a STEM career.

“We held a workshop last night with our FTC team called Beauty and Brains,” Dr. Terrance Burkes co-director of Vicksburg’s VBM Foundation said. “The girls of the FTC team actually taught other girls in the community about FTC and just STEM in general.”

The seminar was held at Alcorn State University Vicksburg campus and the students who participated were broken off into groups to speak with women in the field. Each group discussed a topic such as coding, building and other STEM related topics.

“The girls in the FTC robotics team actually wanted to invite young girls out and talk to them,” Burkes said. “And they actually had break out sessions. They had one for coding, one part for building a robot, another part for driving a robot and they had another session for building a website.”

The organization hopes with this workshop to spark an interest in female students for a STEM centered future. The workshop was a success and the organization hopes to make it an annual event.

“We did a survey of how much the girls learned at the seminar,” Burkes said. “ And they all claimed they learned something new about STEM. So we hope to make this a partnership between VBM and FTC to have events like this annually. We hope to basically get students to start thinking about a STEM career early, for instance in elementary school. ”