Passion Project - Kate Causey, Kjersti Kleine, Hayden Rudd

Post by Kate Causey - Sophomore fellow

Last January Kjersti introduced Hayden and me to GoldieBlox, a revolutionary company which sells engineering toys for young girls. Kjersti is studying health sciences, Hayden chemistry, and I am studying math so these construction toys which enhance spatial reasoning skills and promote success in science and math classrooms were right up our ally. We decided to incorporate this idea into our passion project.

Initially we had the grand idea of inviting Debbie Sterling, the founder of GoldieBlox, a female engineer herself to campus to speak on her experience as a female in this field. Soon after we contacted her company (almost a year ago) GoldieBlox won a contest which awarded them with a Super Bowl advertisement, causing their business to boom. Fortunately for Debbie Sterling and her company, but unfortunately for Furman, Debbie became far too busy to travel across the country.

We did not give up hope and decided to still have a CLP portion of our passion project where we shared a YouTube video of Debbie Sterling’s story. We were also inspired to incorporate a service aspect to the project. Kjersti had spent time at Frazee Dream Center and Hayden and I had served at After School Program. Both of these services to children in the Greenville Area were the perfect venue to share this passion and these toys with young girls. We resolved to have an ice cream fundraiser to purchase GoldieBlox for these organizations.

The next step was to begin to reserve venues and speakers for our event. Over the summer we contacted three women with related expertise to participate in our panel.

• Dr. Erin Hahn is an associate professor of psychology at Furman University. She directs student research on cognitive development in the Furman Learning Lab. She would provide a psychological foundation for understanding how toys like GoldieBlox can encourage females to have careers in math and science fields. 

• Ms. Lynn Mann is the program director at A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering here in Greenville. Named one of the employees of the year in 2014 by Greenville County Schools, she is a strong advocate for STEM education. She would provide examples of education with engineering principles on an elementary school level.

• Mrs. Serita Acker received her Masters of Human Resource Development, Training and Development Emphasis from Clemson University. She is a global career facilitator.  As the Director of the Women in Science and Engineering program at Clemson University, she would address the current issue of women in scientific fields at a university and career level. 

Once we returned to campus from summer break, we had just over a month to finalize details of the event. Dr. Lorraine DeJong is a professor of education at Furman and served as our faculty advisor for the project. She helped us to draft and submit the CLP proposal form.

Eventually all the planning was over and the week had arrived. Tuesday night was the CLP. The speakers were very insightful and the event was well attended. Our team was very happy with the way it turned out. Although it was quite chilly, our ice cream fundraiser Wednesday night was still a hit. In two hours we raised enough to purchase over $400 worth of toys for Frazee and ASP. We are so thankful to Sucker Leadership Institute for the guidance, opportunity, and funding to share this passion with the Furman community and make this project a reality.