Stuart Girls Earn Top Honors at National STEM Video Game Challenge

Five young women stood out among the sea of male faces in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

Julia Weingaertner, Sarah Lippman, Chloe Mario, Madeleine Lapuerta and Emma Froehlich, all eighth graders at Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Princeton, were in the nation’s capital to accept two of the top honors in the 2012 National STEM Video Challenge.

“You did something awesome,” Alex Games, education design director at Microsoft, told the students during the Celebration of Success ceremony at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Making games, like anything good in life, takes a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance and a lot of not giving up.”

The annual competition aims to motivate kids' interest in science, technology, engineering and math learning by tapping into students’ natural passion for playing and making video games. The competition is inspiried by the President Barack Obama's Educate to Innovate campaign to promote STEM education. 

Both teams from Stuart won in the PBS Kids Ready to Learn category for creating video games for children ages four to eight that focus on early math skills. 

More than 3,700 total youth entries were received- 17 individuals and teams were chosen as winners.

Each winner receives a laptop computer, travel to and from Washington for Monday’s ceremony and subscriptions to Brain Pop magazine and Gamestar Mechanic. Each team also wins $2,000 for their school, so Stuart will receive $4,000.

Weingaertner, 13, of West Windsor, and Lippman, 13, of Pennington, designed and programmed “Animal Inequalities” to demonstrate the concepts of greater than or less than.

“When we were in elementary school, our teacher taught us the concept of inequality by saying that the inequality sign was an animal such as a shark, so that’s what we based our game on,” Weingaertner said.

Mario, 14, of Princeton, Lapuerta, 14, of Montgomery, and Froehlich, 14, of Montgomery, built “Math Racing Mania” which allows users to drive home if they can compute simple math problems.

Mario hopes her younger sister may use her game to help learn math.

The idea of winning a national computer competition was perhaps the last thing on the minds of the Stuart girls when they found out in January that all eighth graders would be required to enter the competition as part of a mandatory computer programming course.

“None of them had programmed before,” computer science teacher Alicia Testa said. “So literally they looked at me like, ‘You’re crazy.’ And I was like ‘No, we can do this.’”

The girls worked on their projects through March, using their computer class time, some study halls and even bringing work home at night as the deadline loomed. They brainstormed game ideas, collaborated on strategy and honed programming skills through a user-friendly program called Scratch.

Testa describes her role as a coach on the sidelines, stepping in where the students needed her, but letting them drive the project.

She was thrilled when she learned in early May that two Stuart teams had won. She relayed the news to the parents, who in turn told their daughters.

Lapuerta remembers crying when she found out. Still, she and the others were sworn to secrecy outside of their teacher and families. Even on Monday, when all of the girls were in Washington, D.C. to accept their awards, their classmates had no idea where they had gone.

“Winning was great but also just knowing at the end of the experience that we had accomplished something so great and it was awesome to see our game finally completed after seeing how it came together,” Froehlich said.

The girls said they were surprised to walk into Monday’s event as the only female winners.

“It was really shocking since we go to an all-girls school, we don’t experience a lot of the computer and math and science being mostly boys,” Lippman said. “There are no boys to step in and take that place. It was interesting.”

Testa believes Stuart’s win speaks to the benefits of both single-sex education and the focus on STEM. In 2011, the school announced a new STEM Advisory Task Force to help conquer the so-called “Girl Gap” in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Bill Froehlich, Emma’s father, said Stuart has stressed math and science education under the leadership of head of school Patty L. Fagin. As a result, he was beaming with pride on Monday.

“My daughter is not the quintessential nerd, up in her room playing games,” he said. “She’s artistic, she enjoys music, drawing. For her, this is a really great accomplishment and feeling."

Click here to read teacher Alicia Testa’s blog about the experience and to see all of the girls’ games (the games are on a separate tab at the top of the page).