Digital Youth Divas is an out-of-school program that engages middle school girls, especially those from non-dominant communities, in design-based engineering and computer science activities driven by a narrative story. The program supports girls to develop STEM identities by participating within face-to-face and online spaces to design, create, and re-imagine everyday artifacts (jewelry, hair accessories, music) and activities (dancing and talking to friends) using techniques including collaboration, critique, circuitry, coding, and fabrication.

Since 2013, over 300 girls have participated in core Digital Youth Divas in Chicago. Over the course of the program, girls have demonstrated increased domain-specific content knowledge and development of initial interest in STEM.

Want to learn more? Read about the innovative program components and take a look at the lesson plan sampler.