Go back further in time to 1973, and the world saw Grace Murray Hopper become the first woman of any nationality to be named a distinguished fellow of the British Computer Society.

Go back even further, and there was Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt (circa 370­415), the first woman to make serious contributions to the field of mathematics.

Though separated by place and time, these women shared a common story—they all helped to advance the ranks of women in mathematical and scientific fields by leaps and bounds.

Since the days of Hypatia, women have taken great strides to achieve gender equality in schools and the workforce, but a mentality still persists at times that women cannot accomplish as much as their male counterparts.

That's exactly the kind of thinking the staff at Tech Trek Science Camp hopes to dispel. Well into its sixth year, Tech Trek, designed for girls entering the eighth grade, has grown from one campsite to five sites that are located throughout the state.

One of these programs was held at Stanford University last month, with an estimated 125 participants. The girls stayed in residential halls and ate on campus for the week. Among them were Deetra Kalem, Avery Peterson and Gwynnie Vernon of Los Gatos, Alexa Chavez-Shinmori of Monte Sereno and Clara Wang of Saratoga.

Along with fellow campers, these five girls spent the week studying marine biology, bacteriology or solar energy. They went on boat trips, built Lego robots, extracted DNA from wheat germ and listened to professional women talk about their careers.

"Boys are often pushed in math and science," says Stanford camp instructor Kim Watkins. "This is a way to get girls to look at science and math, especially at this age. You want to catch them when they're young. We just hope we can give them that love for the subjects."

Many of the camp instructors agree it is best to target eighth-graders, as this is the period in young people's lives when they might otherwise lose faith because there is no one pushing them to pursue their interests.

"We're just trying to build their self-esteem so they can be what they're meant to be," says dorm mom Carol Holzgrafe.

"The core message is, 'You can do anything you want to do. Don't let anyone tell you you can't,' " she adds.

Going beyond the regular classroom environment, Tech Trek was designed to provide a unique learning experience.

"Everything's hands-on. They don't have a textbook," says camp director Marie Wolbach.

This way of learning was new to 13-year-old Alexa Chavez-Shinmori of Fisher Middle School, who says she found the hands-on approach refreshing.

"We got to learn a lot more because we got to see what happens," Chavez-Shinmori says as she finishes up a lab experiment during her bacteriology class. Students were handed two petri dishes earlier in the week and had to collect samples of bacteria to grow.

In addition to getting a taste for hands-on experiments, many of the girls at camp also discovered what learning is like without their male counterparts in the classroom.

"It makes the classes quieter, and we learn faster," Chavez-Shinmori says.

"There are no guys here, so it helps the girls focus and accomplish more," agrees Marni Perschnick, a 15-year-old junior counselor from South Lake Tahoe.

Math teacher Becky Sheets, who has participated in Tech Trek all six years of the camp's existence, says the absence of boys makes a world of difference for the female students, who no longer feel intimidated.

"Girls, especially junior high girls, don't want to stand out as smart. Here, they're with 120 other girls who are just like them," she says.

Photograph by Saori Yoneda Thirteen-year-old Deetra Kalem listens to instructions prior to dissecting a squid. Like the other camp participants, Kalem earned a spot in the program after undergoing a rigorous application process that included an in-person interview. At first, she did not think she had been selected, says her mother, Liz Kalem.

"Especially with smart kids, they don't like teamwork," Sheets says, adding that this exercise helps the students develop the skills to work together.

All the girls who were selected for Tech Trek went through a rigorous application process. First, the girls had to be nominated by a teacher. They also had to complete an application, which included submitting an essay. Candidates then went through group interviews with their peers. According to Sheets, the ones selected most likely rank in the top 5 percent of their grade level in the state.

When Wolbach, a member of the American Association of University Women, which sponsors the camp, first proposed the idea of Tech Trek in the mid-'90s, she suggested that it be held on a college campus. Part of her goal was to expose young women to the college experience in order to encourage them to enroll in advanced classes throughout high school. To date, an estimated 2,000 students have attended Tech Trek.

The first class to have gone through the program, in 1998, graduated from high school in June. Organizers say they are compiling data on where those first participants will be attending college in the fall and what fields of study they have chosen.

Like some of her predecessors who returned to Tech Trek as junior counselors, Fisher Middle School student Gwynnie Vernon says she would like to attend the camp again in upcoming years.

"I wish I could live here and go back to my house for a break," says the 13-year-old.

For Vernon, who chose marine biology as her core subject for the week, the most memorable part of camp was the field trip to the Marine Science Institute. The class took a boat out to the bay, where it caught and studied plankton, fish, baby sharks and shrimp.

"We had to figure out which fish was which and then put them back in the ocean," says C.T. English Middle School student Deetra Kalem. Like Vernon, Kalem also chose marine biology as her core class. Her favorite activity during the week was an anatomy assignment where the students made their own paper fish and labeled all its parts.

Over the years, marine biology has become such a popular subject for the girls that the camp has had to open up two classes simultaneously. But there were other core classes to choose from besides marine biology.

Opting to focus on one of these other core classes was Avery Peterson, 13, of C. T. English Middle School. In her solar energy class, Peterson learned to make ovens out of small pizza boxes, with aluminum foil to reflect the sun's rays. At the end of class, she and her fellow classmates took the boxes outdoors and made s'mores.

Later in her robotics class, Peterson worked with another classmate to build a bug out of Lego pieces. Once they had the bug assembled, the girls succeeded in getting it to dance, using a computer program similar to one that NASA uses on the Sojourner Rover.

"They see a direct result of their programming," says robotics instructor Colleen Briner-Schmidt.

Briner-Schmidt says she designed the course to allow the girls to work in pairs, as girls prefer to talk things through more. Briner-Schmidt also made sure the products the girls were building—ranging from bugs to bumper cars or other vehicles—were colorful and were not weapons of mass destruction.

"I've carefully chosen these materials for engaging girls," she says.

All the camp instructors worked hard to make sure they developed a curriculum that would demonstrate how science and math can be fun.

In Nancy Schlink's forensics class, she asked her students to imagine that they were investigators for a crime lab and that they had to identify an unknown white substance based on observations about the powder's reactions with other chemicals. The white substance turned out to be salt.

"It's a really good class to emphasize basic lab skills," says Schlink, who also teaches a forensics course during the school year. Realizing that middle school kids watch TV shows such as CSI, Schlink knew her idea of a forensics class would be well-received.

Another reason for the course is to help kids realize that science can be applied to many fields. Most kids think that if they study science they can only go into medicine, not realizing there are alternatives, such as becoming a forensics scientist or working in a lab to create make-up products, Schlink says.

"A lot of kids don't realize so many other jobs need science," she says.

Next year, Schlink says, she would like to see the camp offer a science/art class where students can learn about chemistry and the properties of ingredients while cooking.

"Science is actually cool, and it's actually important to your life," she says.

As expected, Schlink's forensics class was a hit among students, including Peterson. Denise Chambers, Peterson's mother, recalls that that was the first thing her daughter mentioned about her week at camp.

Thrilled that the camp "made an impression" on her daughter, Chambers says the experience also helped develop Peterson's sense of independence, as she had to interact with more than 100 new girls without her mother or sister present.

"Not only was she learning about science, she was learning social skills," Chambers says.

For Peterson, her expectations of the camp were met. "I was just hoping that I would get to do a lot of hands-on stuff," she says, adding that she wished camp had lasted longer.

Throughout the week, students attended their core classes in the morning and went on field trips or listened to guest speakers in the afternoon. One speaker was a woman who has worked on four Pixar animation films, including Toy Story and Finding Nemo. She came one afternoon to introduce the girls to the world of computer science.

During one night outing, camp participants got to view the Hubble Space Telescope through another telescope set up on a campus hillside. On a different night, they met with women from different professional fields. Members of the San Jose CyberRays soccer team visited the camp one afternoon.

Redwood Middle School student Clara Wang recalls "having a lot of free time" in between the scheduled activities. Like many of her peers, she found that being able to roam a campus with freedom was an experience in itself.

That was the sort of independence that Kalem's mother, Liz Kalem, was glad to see her daughter gain.

"She felt so positive about going," Liz says. "I could tell she grew a lot just as a person, learning interpersonal relationship skills. She felt successful in what they had her do. She came home and rattled off everything to me that she had learned."

Fostering the girls' interest in the sciences while helping them to develop social skills and boost their self-esteem was exactly what Wolbach had hoped
to achieve.

"The comfort level at an all-girls camp goes way up," she says.