UNLV Girls’ STEM Camp Completes Spring Session with Support from Sands

In late April, the University of Nevada Las Vegas completed the spring semester of its 2025-2026 UNLV Girls’ STEM Camp, a year-long extracurricular program for elementary and middle school girls made possible by a $75,000 Sands Cares contribution.

The camp encourages interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects and career tracks. Over fall and spring semesters, the 2025-2026 UNLV Girls’ STEM Camp included 16 girls from eight Clark County schools and was designed, taught and operated by faculty, staff and graduate students from the UNLV Colleges of Engineering and Education, with support from community partners.

The spring semester continued the camp’s interdisciplinary and interactive approach to integrating STEM education with entrepreneurship by emphasizing creativity, collaboration and real-world problem-solving in 20 weekly sessions. Spring curriculum covered subjects such as chemistry, physics and optics, engineering design and renewable energy.

A new element introduced this semester was a student-led entrepreneurship cycle. In five dedicated meetings, students moved from ideation to executing public presentations by taking ownership of developing original product and service concepts.

To identify topics aligned with their interests, students engaged in guided discussions and self-organized into teams based on shared passions. Within each group or “company,” students were assigned corporate roles such as CEO, lead designer, chief engineer and marketing lead, simulating a real-world startup environment and reinforcing individual accountability within a collaborative team.

The spring semester culminated with each team presenting their products, business ideas and brand identities to instructors, mentors and guests. Student presentations ranged from producing an educational animation series that explores different cultures, creating an eye and vision health initiative, and developing a beauty and personal care brand.

“By the end of the spring semester, we saw visible shifts in how students approached their work and described their ideas,” Yingtao Jiang, associate dean of the College of Engineering at UNLV, said. “They used vocabulary related to design, prototyping, branding and customers more comfortably and more often than at the start of the semester.

“They moved from completing assigned tasks to identifying problems on their own and asking how their ideas might serve real users. In their final presentations, students drew on chemistry, optics, energy and engineering vocabulary from earlier sessions, indicating genuine knowledge transfer rather than isolated unit learning.”

With a seed investment from Sands, UNLV established the Girls’ STEM Camp to address the wide gender disparity in STEM-related fields. The American Association of University Women estimates that women make up only 26% of the STEM workforce. Gaps appear early, with women underrepresented in STEM majors in higher education, particularly in engineering and computer science.

Engage, an organization that promotes economic security for American women, notes that one of the biggest drop-offs in girls’ STEM participation is during the middle school years, when interest in classes such as computer science wanes, resulting in fewer girls taking AP exams in STEM classes.

“We believe in the value of giving school-age girls early exposure to STEM topics and are thrilled to see the impact the camp has made on participants,” Ron Reese, senior vice president global communications and corporate affairs at Sands, said.

“With this in-depth and transformative experience, participants are seeing STEM opportunities come to life and themselves in these careers, particularly with the addition of the entrepreneurship component,” he continued. “The camp gives young girls access and exposure that classroom environments generally cannot replicate. This unique approach is a true win for the development of future women innovators and STEM leaders from the Las Vegas community.”

The UNLV Girls’ STEM Camp continues this summer with 15 sessions in June and early July. Students will work with their spring teammates and in their corporate roles to move concepts to a more developed prototype, draft more robust business plans, build working samples and pilot content, refine branding and packaging, and rehearse more polished pitches. STEM curriculum will support the projects students have chosen.

Sands’ involvement in the UNLV Girls’ STEM Camp aligns with the company’s focus on workforce development and helping build an inclusive workforce of the future through education, mentorship and skills development programs. To learn more about Sands’ workforce development and education initiatives, read the company’s latest environmental, social and governance report: https://www.sands.com/resources/reports