WATERVILLE — Saraphina Persaud wanted to create a website that helps people be safe online.

Persaud, a rising seventh grader from Presque Isle, knows people who have fallen for phishing scams, where they have been tricked into sharing too much information online.

At last week’s Girls Who Code summer camp at Thomas College, she decided to create a fake depression test that would bring attention to the dangers of click bait — content that encourages people to click on it for views — as a way to warn people against sharing personal information on the internet.

To make the test, she changed the spelling of words to see if people will catch onto the idea that the quiz is fake.

“It’s important that people are protecting themselves online,” Persaud said. “People shouldn’t take click bait tests. But if they do, they need to be careful not to give out that much information.”

The camp in Waterville is the first of three scheduled to be held this year in Maine. Other sessions of the camp will be at the University of Maine as another overnight camp and a day option at the Roux Institute in Portland.

“In Maine, we have a lot of diversity in our economic status and population density, where some of our towns are very rural where others are very urban,” said Shelby Bryant, the program specialist for Project Login through Educate Maine. “It depends where you are. So, Girls Who Code is for everyone to come together and talk about those differences and figure out a way that everyone is represented in the career path that they choose. We are just doing that through the lens of computer science.”

Girls Who Code is a national organization that Project Login partners with through Educate Maine.

In the camp’s first session, 27 girls from across the state attended. The overnight camp gave the girls a chance to build relationships, and camp organizers to fit more educational opportunities in, by hosting guest speakers or organizing field trips. The girls visited the Challenger Learning Center in Bangor as a day trip.

At Thomas College, the girls were tasked with creating a website to provide people with helpful information. The group of middle school and high school students— some of whom have never dabbled in coding — were instructed to make a website or a phone app to relay the information.

Like Persaud, most of the girls knew right away how to they wanted to help.

Jailinn Fortin, 14, of Jay, arrived with basic coding skills and chose to build a website that could help local farmers take care of their horses. After living on a farm her entire life, she knows that it can be difficult, for example, to spot colic, a horse illness. The signs can be mistaken for everyday activities a horse does, like sitting and rolling around in the grass.

“Around 64,000 horses die every year from colic,” Fortin said. “I want to make this website to help make a difference so farmers know what to look for.”

Attending the camp solidified her decision to do something related to computer science or engineering in her future and maybe, in college, which is the goal of the free summer camp put on by Project Login through Educate Maine: for underrepresented youth to bridge the divide in STEM, an acronym that stands for science, technology, engineering and math.

Across the United States, women are statistically underrepresented in the field. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in the 2021-22 academic year, 509,064 men and 280,200 women competed a bachelor degree in a STEM-related field. In the 2012-13 academic year, the first year for which data is available, 397,223 men and 176,777 women completed a bachelor’s degree in a STEM-related field.

Nic Chouinard, the lead facilitator at the camp, is a science teacher at Spruce Mountain Middle School. He encouraged Fortin, who was his student at the school, to attend the camp when he saw her interest in coding.

Although Chouinard has a science background, he never became involved with coding or computer science until he took professional development courses through Educate Maine’s Computer Science Summer of Fun, which teaches educators how to become better at computer science to be able to teach a class at their school.

Like some of the girls at the camp, Chouinard learned recently how to code and loves helping the students learn how to do it.

“I never did any computer science, and I always had people making it look super complicated and super tricky,” Chouinard said. “And then, a couple of years ago, I realized, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be this super-complicated thing.’ It’s really just a few logic steps and putting things together. Anyone can do it, but I think that a lot of people make it more complicated and less inviting than it is.”

The camp is attempting to close the gender gap in STEM, but all students are encouraged to attend as its for all underrepresented youth.

Although the number of women entering a STEM-related field increases yearly, Bryant said the camp recognizes that girls entering the field face obstacles and  the camp attempts to prepare them for whatever they may encounter. The goal at the end of the week is to take what they learned to a Girls Who Code club at their school.

“I think there are still obstacles they face and may not recognize why those obstacles exist, but they definitely have to be prepared to tackle some of those situations,” Bryant said. “We actually did an activity this week that I loved where we try to reprogram our brains.

“So something we talk about is that if there is an obstacle, how do we overcome it? We start to reprogram our brains not to say, ‘I failed at this,’ but to say, ‘I need to study more,’ or (change) ‘I have no friends’ to ‘I can make new friends.'”