Lina Qasem ROBOFUN Vanessa Doake Code Like a Girl Kim Ellis Space Lawyer Natasha Mandie EM Advisory Elicia Wong STEM Entrepreneur Jacqueline Dohaney STEM Educator Francine Marques Geneticist & Medical Researcher Tanya Hill Astronomer
Educational Resources for Victorian Teachers
 

Welcome to an online repository of resources aimed at tackling the issue of under-participation and under-representation of women in the Australian STEM sector.

Videos + Case Studies For Your Classroom

We’ve created a series of case studies to help tackle the issue of under-participation and under-representation of women in the Australian STEM Sector. Our cases feature women who’ve combined their STEM backgrounds with enterprise skills to realise their dreams, and hopefully inspire your students to do the same.

 
banner1.png
Lina Qasem.jpg

Lina
Qasem

Founding ROBOFUN

Natasha Mandie EM Advisory.jpg

Natasha
Mandie

Seeing patterns in data

We aim to help girls imagine their potential futures through educational materials showcasing talented women who’ve turned their passion for STEM into enterprising careers.

For each of the profiled women, you'll find:

  • A video featuring the story of how she turned her passion for STEM into an enterprising venture

  • A case study designed for use in a Victorian secondary school classroom environment

  • Teaching notes to assist you in delivering the materials and help you maximise the benefit of the materials for your students.

The resources are specifically designed to help you deliver fun and engaging content in your classroom, and are intended to provide an envisioned positive future for girls who may one day enter the STEM sector.

 
banner2.png
 
 

Career Insights

What does ‘working in STEM’ really look like?

In these videos, we hear from women who have careers in STEM. They share their journeys of how they were inspired to follow STEM pathways, and what a ‘day in the life’ of a STEM professional really looks like.

 
 

dr jacqueline dohaney

Dr Jacqueline Dohaney is a STEM Education Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology. In this video, she shares her journey through STEM and some of the innovative projects she’s worked on, like designing a video game to help students experience science in real-time! Through her career, she strives to make science more accessible and welcoming for all people.

Dr Francine marques

Dr Francine Marques works as an Associate Professor and a Medical Researcher at Monash University. From a young age, Francine was told that she could do anything! She decided she wanted to help people. In this video, Francine walks us through a ‘day in the life’ of a scientist and tells us about the gifts that STEM can give us, including: being able to leave a legacy, and solve problems.

Dr Tanya Hill

Dr Tanya Hill works as an astronomer for the Melbourne Planetarium at Scienceworks. Through sharing her story, Tanya encourages us to be curious about the world around us, and to develop skills that can help make life a better place for all of us.

What is Enterprise Education?

Enterprise education includes the development of skills in the following areas:

side-bannerLH.png

  • Creative thinking: having ‘big ideas’ and not being afraid to try things. Being creative is about applying ‘out of the box’ problem-solving approaches.

  • Problem-solving and decision making: being capable of critical thinking and having skills to investigate problems, and evaluate possible solutions. This involves being able to gather relevant information and analyse it from multiple perspectives, as well as being able to predict possible outcomes.

  • Leadership, teamwork and communication skills: motivating your team, delegating responsibilities, and having the ability to communicate your ideas including listening and appreciating feedback.

  • Risk-taking: being able to evaluate risk and deciding suitable courses of action.

  • Digital literacy: with technology affecting all aspects of our lives, it is becoming more and more important to evaluate information in different formats and in productive ways.

  • Financial literacy: understanding the financial viability of ideas and how to generate more money than you spend.

In the short term, enterprise education can positively influence students’ motivation, attendance, retention and connectedness.

In the long term, enterprise education is found to be an effective means of shaping enterprise - related abilities in later life.

 

Enterprising skills are essential for navigating the working landscape of the future (Foundation for Young Australians, 2018).

big-square.png
 
 

Classroom Activities

 
 
MARSHMALLOW_CHALLENGE.jpeg

Marshmallow Challenge

Who can build the tallest structure using only 20 sticks of spaghetti, some tape and string, and one marshmallow? Download a copy of the Activity Sheet including instructions for teachers, suggested discussion points, and curriculum mapping.

airplane contest

If you could design a paper plane capable of carrying $1 worth of coins across the sky, what would it look like?
In this activity, students work in teams to design, create, and pitch their ideas for the perfect plane design to the class.

‘too cools’

What’s the ‘coolest’ product you can think of? What special expertise was needed to build it? Where did the technology come from? In this activity you’ll be blending technology and curiosity to get students exploring the latest products in the marketplace.

 

Mapping Enterprise Skills to the Victorian Secondary School Curriculum

To ensure the materials available in this online repository are relevant to your classroom teaching, we’ve mapped enterprise skills to the Victorian Secondary School Curriculum.

Click here to download your enterprise skills curriculum map

side-banner.png