Young women helping young women to ‘dream of STEM’

This week, STEM Ka Sapna, an inspiring youth-led organisation, tells us about its aspirations to help young women pursue their dreams:

STEM Ka Sapna is a registered non-profit organisation aiming to teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) concepts to girls in India through a virtual manner. Ultimately, our organisation strives to help gradually decrease the gender gap in the STEM fields, with the introduction of various resources, and spark an interest in the field to many girls across the various states of India. This is why the name of the organisation is STEM Ka Sapna, as the translation of the phrase is ‘the dream of being in STEM’.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are teaching girls through the Zoom software virtually. Additionally, in the future, we would like to target underprivileged children in India by funding and providing laptops for them to attend our classes.

The issues with STEM education, not just in India but in many developing countries, include lack of resources, and people who are willing to take the time to educate students about why they should develop an interest for and enter the STEM field. Additionally, within the STEM fields, there is a wide gender gap, with females being a minority. Therefore, as girls aspiring to be in the STEM field, the team of STEM Ka Sapna feels it is our duty to encourage more girls to enter the field, especially in a country that they have a connection with, India. STEM Ka Sapna and our volunteers hope to do just that – inspire young girls to pursue their dreams and help decrease the gender gap in the STEM field.

The team of STEM Ka Sapna is composed of high school girls of Indian descent in America who are extremely interested in the STEM field. We will be teaching the course as we have many achievements and qualifications within the field, such as years of experience in programming, conducting several computer science projects, and winning awards with these projects at regional, state, and international levels. Our organisation was started in order to provide STEM resources to girls in India so that they could develop an interest in the field at a young age. We wouldn’t have been able to start the organisation or been able to develop an interest for and pursue our passion in this field if it weren’t for the resources that we were given. We now want to make sure that every girl has access to these kinds of opportunities, and in order to do that, are spreading our passion for STEM and sparking interest in young girls very similar to us to create an impact in the world and inspire young Indian girls.

So far in our organisation, we have over 80 girls throughout India who have registered for the course and we just had an orientation class. Within the next week, we will start with our 10 weekly lessons over Scratch concepts. In the near future, we will be implementing more courses, such as an Introduction to Python course, and courses on machine learning and Java.

Please visit our website to find out more about what we do: https://www.stemkasapna.org/

Thank you,

STEM Ka Sapna Non-profit Organisation