Books
Middle Grade Non-Fiction
STEM Like a Girl: Empowering Knowledge and Confidence to Lead, Innovate, and Create

STEM Like a Girl: Empowering Knowledge and Confidence to Lead, Innovate, and Create

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Author(s)

Sarah Foster

Publisher

Workman Publishing

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

September 14, 2021

ISBN

978-0762472611

Buy This Book

STEM Like a Girl empowers girls, 8-12, with the knowledge and confidence to become future problem solvers and leaders in the scientific world and beyond. This fully illustrated and photographic book profiles 35 inspiring girls and offers 15 hands-on, STEM-based experiments that they can do at home.

While leading a hands-on engineering project in her son's elementary school, researcher and biotech engineer Sarah Foster noticed fewer girls raising their hands or jumping into the activities than the boys. Surprised to see a gender gap at play at such a young age, she decided to do something about it. She founded STEM Like a Girl in 2017 with the goal of introducing young girls to the fun and rewarding fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

In her first book, Sarah captures 35 girls expressing their love of all things STEM, Each girl speaks to her inspirations and role models, her favorite types of experiments, and why failure is almost always a good thing. Along with these profiles are 15 experiments girls can do at home on their own or with adults including extracting DNA from a strawberry, employing Newton's Third Law of Motion to build and fire an air cannon, and enacting acid-base chemistry to create homemade fizzy bath bombs.

Editor review

1 review

Easy and instructive experiments

April 07, 2025 (Updated: June 15, 2026)

Overall rating

4.3

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

4.0

Learning Value

5.0

It's one thing to have a book of science experiments. There are tons of those. What makes STEM like a girl different is the inclusion of a wide variety of tween girls who are interested in science. Alongside their pictures are interviews with them that discuss their interests in science and how they work their experiements into their everyday lives.

There are eleven experiments and four design challenges. All are rated as to the level of difficulty, and include a "STEM application" page that discusses the real life uses of the project. For example, the bath bombs are an example of acid-base chemistry and the marble maze uses skills that aspiring civil engineers might find helpful. There are a few unusual items needed for the projects, but the only thing I was missing for the bath bombs was Epsom salts, which my parents always had on hand! Most items are things that would be found around the house, or would be easy and fairly inexpensive to find at a store.

Good Points

There's a lot of white space on the page, which gives this a fresh, clean, lab-like feel to the pages. There's a lot of use of blue and green in the text and photographs, which was nice to see; this wasn't stereotypically "girly" and pink, which will appeal to a wider range of readers.

As someone who frequently asked to melt string onto an ice cube with salt (the only science experiment I remember being allowed to do!), I know I would have loved this as a tween. I may yet make the squishy soap, since I have a container of gelatine at home! Give this to a budding scientist in your life with the promise of working on several of the experiments with her. Other books you may want to consider to go with this book include Campbell's Science Experiments for Girls: Science Activities for Kids 8-12 (At Home Science Experiments for Kids), Connolly's The Book of Terrifyingly Awesome Technology: 27 Experiments for Young Scientists (Irresponsible Science), Brunelle's Turn This Book Into a Beehive!: And 19 Other Experiments and Activities That Explore the Amazing World of Bees, or Storey Publishing's Backpack Explorer books.