Platform Shoes Forum and Zoey's Room

 

Zoey's Room is a digital learning community maintained through peer-to-peer and youth-adult mentoring that supports females in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. The platform contains a fun tool that fuses the interactive components of social media into an educational format, allowing learners and educators to create and remix challenges for use in and out of the classroom. Originally aimed at a middle-school audience, we're extending this platform to include high school girls and beyond. Though numbers are increasing of women in STEM careers, many leave the field due to isolation. Gender inequity and wage disparity still exists in these fields, and women tend to internalize its constructs and blame themselves for failure. Our organization is working with key partners to leverage the Zoey's Room platform to create a support system for females entering into the STEM pipeline. The goal is to broaden the participation of females and affect the retention of this underrepresented sector in STEM fields and careers.