Inventor Badge: My Experience as a Brownies Young Leader
As a young leader at a Brownie unit I have seen my girls achieve many things: from making cupcakes and choreographing dance routines; to building ziplines for teddy bears and designing and building their dream room in a shoebox. All of this is amazing and every single time they achieve something new I am so proud of them, but nothing has made me quite as proud as the time they earned their inventor badge.
To earn their badge, one of many STEM focused badges in the program, they had to work in small groups to come up with an idea for an invention, design it and build a prototype before presenting it to the entire unit, all over the space of two one and a half hour meetings. The girls range in age from 7 to about 9, and what they managed to create was incredible, both for their age and in general. Among the inventions designed and created by the girls was multiple chocolate themed inventions and my personal favourite- a robot dog. All of their models were built out of old cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and sticky tape. Lots and lots of sticky tape! By the end of their time they had created some great inventions and some of the reasons behind them were even better.
While a few of the groups cited their reasons as “We just really like chocolate” or “we thought it would be cool”, one group in particular seemed to have really thought about what they had built. That group was the group that built the robot dog. They decided that they had built the dog for elderly people who might be lonely and have no one to talk to but did not have the energy or the mobility to care for a real dog.
This made me realise how much the girls got what the point of inventing is.
They found a problem they wanted to solve, worked together to make a solution and then presented it in a way that got their point across perfectly. Throughout the task there were bumps in the road, disagreements over what colour things should be, arguments over whether they needed another cardboard box and debates over whether more glitter should be added- the answer was always yes. They may be serious inventors but that didn’t mean what they created couldn’t be glittery!
At the end of the night I went home incredibly proud of what the girls had achieved, happy that maybe some of them would consider STEM subjects when they were older but also with a slightly sparkly uniform! Doing STEM activities with the girls reminded me of how much I love STEM and made me even more determined to keep trying to teach other young people about STEM. My role isn’t always about teaching them about science, but every time I do, it feels a little bit more special.
My experience as a young leader who has the opportunity to run STEM activities has shown me that sometimes you don’t need to be doing something big to make a difference to people. Some of my Brownies admitted that they didn’t know about any female inventors before working on the badge, and I have to admit, I didn’t either. A lot of the time I learn just as much from the girls as they do from me, whether its about inventors or which TV shows kids like to watch these days. To anyone considering volunteering, both in STEM and out of it I would say go for it! You never know what you will learn or how sparkly you will end up coming out of it!
Cover Image Credit: Girlguiding Badge History (https://guidebadges.co.uk/).
