Girls in Maths

A group of year 10 girls took part in an event called Girls in Maths at the University of Liverpool in March. This exciting Futures-related opportunity was all about encouraging girls to consider studying maths right through to university level. It was also a chance for the students to find out more about the benefits of higher education and university life in general.

The students took part in three workshops which explored the many different ways that maths is used in the real world:

• Hands on Stats – designing their own mathematical enquiry
• Graphing in Real Life – using a velocity-time graph to measure the distance to a hole in the ground (using the time it took for a stone to hit the ground and its estimated velocity to measure the distance)
• Maths in Music – measuring the sound waves of their own voices

In addition to taking part in the workshop sessions, the students heard from women who are prominent in fields connected with maths, including Professor Rachel Bearon, who is a head of department at the university.

The students also took part in a careers carousel, which gave them the opportunity to chat with students, engineers, chemists and physicists.

STEM refers to science, technology, engineering and maths. There is an ongoing national campaign to promote STEM subjects and to boost the number of young people, particularly girls, who choose STEM-related career pathways.