Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance & Women in STEM will engage high school girls in a virtual book club. The Book Club will read Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly, the true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil right movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. This book club will engage students December through January via online discussion, video interviews with female STEM professionals, and science & history resources to dig deeper into the topics of the book in addition to two STEM Cafe meetings.

The book club will culminate in a viewing of Hidden Figures and panel discussion with female STEM professionals during Flight Night Space Week in January 2017. Follow up will include tie-ins to Black History Month and exposure to scholarships for minorities and women going into STEM fields.

“But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.”