Pine-Richland's SciGirls club finalists in contest

When friends Mahika Sampat and Devin Golla were younger they enjoyed going to the Carnegie Science Center together and even memorized the periodic table for a fourth-grade talent show.

Now the two are seniors at Pine-Richland High School and founders of the SciGirls club, which placed as a finalist at the Chain Reaction Contraption Contest sponsored by Westinghouse at the Carnegie Science Center in December.

“It was honestly one of the best experiences I’ve had in high school, and I think I can speak for all the girls because after working on it for so long and so hard and being so proud of it, going in we were like whatever happens we know we love this project,” Sampat said. “It shows we really accomplished something and made something happen.”

Sampat said that it was after she was the only girl in a robotics class that she approached Golla about starting a science club for girls to encourage and foster participation and interest in the field. The two did something similar in middle school, so at the beginning of their junior year they got physics teacher Heather Rogus on board as advisor and drafted a proposal to create the club.

They first entered the Chain Reaction Contraption Contest last year, shortly after forming the club. The contest challenges students to build Rube Goldberg machines that use chain reactions — such as a ball rolling down a ramp then dropping into a bucket that’s on a string and a pulley that lifts another bucket — in order to perform a task.

This year’s challenge was to tie a knot. Competing teams come up with a theme, and rather than go with something obvious such as getting married, a pretzel or a shoe, Sampat said, the students decided to go with a Star Wars theme. Playing off an Obi-Wan Kenobi quote about the force binding everything in the universe together, they used action figures and other Star Wars imagery in their machine, played music from the movie and dressed in costume at the competition.

The machine itself consisted of 20 steps and the students spent countless hours working on it in the months leading up to the competition in early December.

“They’d start right after school, and these are extremely busy girls that are taking rigorous course loads,” Rogus said. “To see their commitment and follow-through has been amazing. I’ve been a teacher for over 25 years and to get to observe this, it picked me up a little just watching their enthusiasm for science.”

In addition to Golla and Sampat, students who worked on the project and competed at the Science Center were seniors Radha Patel and Kate Schillinger, sophomores Jessica Czerski, Elly Jang and Lakshmi Natesan and eighth-graders Jaimee Joshi, Sreyashi Mondal and Kesar Sampat, the younger sister of Mahika who would come over to the high school with her friends to help when the middle school day ended.

Many of the younger girls offered some of the best ideas, Sampat said.

Out of 40 teams, SciGirls made it to the semifinals.

Since forming the club, the members have also participated in the March for Science in downtown Pittsburgh and led Brownie and Girl Scout Troops in experiments and other projects in order to earn badges.

Sampat hopes the club will continue on and inspire more young girls.

“It just shows that if you really put a group of determined young girls together, it sounds cheesy but, honestly, you can accomplish so much,” she said. “The club makes us aware of those kinds of things from an earlier age and while we understand that things are so much better now and there are so many women in these fields, at the same time there’s a need for more.”

Karen Price is a Tribune-Review contributor.