Danielle Olson, Founder of Gique, discussed creative ways of combining STEM concepts and the arts in her conversation with Venture Café Presents host Christine Dunn at the recent Venture Café Female Founders Night.

“I always felt like I was at odds with how to choose between my artistic and creative side and that more technical, rigorous, science and mathematics side,” said Danielle. While earning her engineering degree at MIT, however, she saw the creative side of engineering and the sciences, and really wanted to bring that to youth in the Boston area.

Danielle is an engineer by training and has worked for high-powered companies like Microsoft. She is also getting her PhD in Computer Science. “Passion is really important when it comes to working really hard,” said Danielle. “Because I love what I’m doing with my students and my co-founders, it really doesn’t feel like work anymore.” Gique offers two different programs in the Boston area geared toward inspiring young people to change the world with STEAM. One is an afterschool program, coordinated with the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester. Once each week, self-identified ‘geek’ volunteers work with youth to create things from holograms to wearable technology. Currently, there are 15 students enrolled in the year-long activity and they look forward to expanding this pilot program to other sites in the future.

“We are actually witnessing our students taking problems from their everyday lives, things that they are experts at in their daily day-to-days, and actually using STEAM concepts to solve them,” continued Danielle. She describes robot-run shelters and first aid kit vending machines as a few examples of innovations created by her students.

The second program offered by Gique is Science Can Dance. Created by one of Danielle’s co-founders, Science Can Dance teaches students science concepts through dance and movement. The program engages girls from elementary to middle school by choreographing movement to showcase things such as the concept of a computer function.

“That ended up enabling them to break down that concept and really remember it because through that body movement, that repetition, they were able to take a concept and really integrate it into something that’s memorable,” said Olson. Science Can Dance reaches beyond Massachusetts to students across the country in places such as the California Bay Area.

“I’m doing something to help people in my community. I’m helping inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists, and dancers,” said Danielle. “I’m actually going to be making a difference in the lives of the students who are participating.”

Her advice to middle school girls struggling with their own identities in math and science fields, in particular, is to take time to understand the environment in which they live, the things that enable them to live, work and play on a daily basis and how those things have changed over time. Then she encourages them to think about a problem they are passionate about and explore ways in which the arts and sciences can help them find an innovative solution.

“At the end of the day, I don’t think that the question is, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” concluded Danielle. “It’s ‘How do you want to make the world a better place? What is that impact you want to have? What problems do you want to solve, and can engineering and science fit into that picture?’ At the end of the day, I think a lot of times the answer is yes, absolutely.”

Science Can Dance was recently part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Gique will also be hosting #HackDorchester Project on April 26, 2016.

Related Links

For more information on this and other events or to find out more about Gique, visit their website,www.gique.me.

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