GOALS for Girls at the Intrepid Museum

Reviews (1)

• Review from the 2021 Summer Camp Survey

  September 2021

  Name of camp: GOALS for Girls Location: The Intrepid Air & Space Museum How old was your child when they attended camp this summer? It’s for girls entering 9th or 10th grade Review: This is a free 6-week program to engage girls in STEM activities while also encouraging them to think about STEM career possibilities and to learn about themselves a bit. They spend time learning the history of the Intrepid, aeronautic science and aerospace history, environmental science and marine biology (focused on the Hudson) and some robotics/coding. My daughter found learning about the Intrepid more interesting than I thought she would and liked her time on the ship. The best part is probably being with a very diverse group of girls from around the city that are all smart and engaged and interested in science/math/programming/robotics, etc. What would you change about the program, if anything, and why? This year they had to do most of the program via Zoom because the Intrepid wasn’t fully reopened yet when it began. But as things opened up they did have a dew days on the shio and other field trips. Zoom is hard, especially when you’re passively listening to speakers (each week they had women from different fields come to talk about themselves and their jobs/careers). i think my daughter sometimes got distracted and them felt bad afterward that she didn’t get as much out of the speakers as she could have. In person, the talks could have been more interactive and there would have been more hands-on stuff, which she lives for. And I think she would have formed some really great friendships. That said, she’s happy she did it, learned a lot, and did make one new friend. And as an alum she has access to additional opportunities on the Intrepid throughout high school. And as a free program anything she got out of it was wonderful. It was ideal for that summers when they’re too old for camp/too young to work. Would you like to add anything related to COVID and how the camp handled it? You can only do the program once so I hope next year they can be in-person again next year but I think it’s worthwhile even if it’s partly remote.