Frisco High School junior Brianna Royer is more of the exception rather than the norm in her aerospace engineering class.
In a class of 14, she is one of four girls enrolled, reports the Frisco Enterprise.
She hopes that lopsided enrollment in science, technology, engineering, and math classes changes in the future. For her part, she recently launched an after-school program to teach third- through fifth-graders how to code.
“While I am personally not bothered by the odds that are stacked against me, it can make women who take STEM classes feel more isolated and treated as more of an oddity than a working member of the class,” Brianna told the Frisco Enterprise. “I want the idea of women in STEM careers and classes to be normalized.”
FrisCode uses a beginner coding curriculum from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brianna also writes her own code for the class, which is offered on Tuesdays for girls and Thursdays for boys.
“My goal is to continue this camp every year and to run it at every high school with the support of high school volunteer and computer science groups,” Brianna told the newspaper.
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