In the world of Girl Scouts, the Gold Award is the ultimate achievement, and one only about 3,000 girls–or 6% of Girl Scouts–will receive each year. Kaelyn Hendricks, a junior at Arlington Tech, is one of them. She reached out to Boolean Girl with an idea for a Gold Award project, and we knew it would be something special.

The path to a Gold Award is a long one, and not just in the 80 hours of planning and execution addressing an underlying issue in the community required for the project alone. Kaelyn joined the Girl Scouts in 2016 and has been working through her badges ever since. In addition to volunteer work like that she will be doing in conjunction with her Gold Award, she enjoyed the fun projects and experiences she had as a Girl Scout in elementary school. Then in middle school, Girls Scouts gave her opportunities to surround herself with professionals through conferences and networking events, and she was able to see what her future could look like.

“I saw how strong the Girl Scouts community was, and it made me want to stay in it,” said Kaelyn.

Once she hit her sophomore year of high school, she began thinking about her Gold Award and the possible projects she would want to do. Kaelyn knows that teaching is in her future–she wants to one day be a second-grade teacher and currently interns as a teacher’s assistant at the Montessori Public School of Arlington. The daughter of an engineer and captain of her robotics team, Kaelyn also loves STEM and was exposed to STEM learning early on but craved a more creative and fun path to learning. So she decided to combine her love for teaching and STEM into her Gold Award project.

To kick it off, Kaelyn began asking around at local schools to find out what teachers needed. Through this, she learned about the many resources required to expand STEM programs, and how hard those resources are to come by in many areas. She also learned that girls often think of computer science and engineering more as male pursuits and are turned off from following many STEM fields because they see them as male-dominated.

Gender diversity is still a major issue in these career fields, and like Boolean Girl, Kaelyn wants to help change that.

For her Gold Award, Kaelyn created the curriculum for a Clubhouse where students would learn Scratch, a free and creative block-based coding platform. She began with an intro activity and developed a slide show to teach her students all they need to start working in Scratch. With Kaelyn’s resources and support, the girls in her Clubhouses then dove in and infused their own creativity into their projects. While the intro was for the full group, Kaelyn was able to do more one-on-one teaching working with her students.

“A lot of times, they think of things I wouldn’t have even thought about!” She said, explaining some of the projects.

Through her Montessori internship, Kaelyn also helps with a Boolean Girl after-school Clubhouse run by Renee Shaw. She enjoys helping her students be creative as they learn how to make things function and move, and she especially loves seeing the unique elements and customizations they each bring to their work.

When she’s not teaching her own Clubhouses, helping teachers at the Montessori School, and leading her school’s robotics team in tournaments, Kaelyn is in school herself and working on her college applications. We can’t wait to see where she goes from here!

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Boolean Girl and the Girl Scouts National Capital Region have a longstanding partnership that has helped troops and individual scouts learn STEM and achieve their Coding Basics badge. Our Saturday morning Clubhouses in Arlington are always free for Girl Scouts! You can learn more and sign up here.