Being a Girl Scout means more than campfires and cookies for Celaine Hornsby.

It means science, technology, engineering, and medicine.

The 10-year-old Junior Girl Scout from Oakmont-Verona Troop 50961 not only participates in service projects, but also science projects.

Among those are the annual Odyssey of the Mind problem solving competition and the Lego Robotics Competition.

Her Odyssey of the Mind team—one of several from Riverview School District's Tenth Street Elementary in Oakmont—took first place in regional competition this past spring and placed fifth in the state.

In addition, the 10-year-old and six other members of Girl Scout Troop 50961 competed in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge sponsored by the FIRST LEGO League and Carnegie Mellon University.

“We had to program robots to do certain missions,” Celaine said. “We were all nine and we came in twenty-fourth place in the state out of 72 teams.”

The group, which participated in the competition this past December, was one of the youngest, one of only four all girl teams, and the first and only group from the Girl Scout Scouts Western Pennsylvania.

“They really did a good job,” Celaine’s mother, Catherine Hornsby said. “It’s been a really good learning experience, especially for Celaine.”

The participation of Celaine and her friends in the program was part of an effort on the part of the Girl Scouts to increase girl’s involvement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine—or STEM—fields.

Girl Scouts Western Pennsylvania (GSWPA) Public Relations and Advertising Manager, Cori Begg, said Celaine and her fellow team members were part of a long tradition of Girl Scout participation in those fields.

“Girl Scouts has a long history of encouraging girls to participate in STEM,” she said. “The first STEM badges—the electrician badge and the flyer badge—were introduced in 1913.”

Celaine’s dad, Dean Hornsby—an engineer—stepped up to coach the team last year. Celaine said that made things really fun.

The teams had to come up with a creative solution for a problem, she said.

Fitting into the most recent competition’s biomedical theme, the solution had to serve a curative or preventive purpose.

“Our team researched asthma, because two of the girls on our team had asthma,” Celaine said.

The team created a vest to monitor the amount of pollen in the air that would monitor how much medicine from a nebulizer would be required.

In addition to her STEM-related pursuits, Celaine also dances at Riverview, plays softball with the Riverview Athletic Association and plays three instruments—the violin, the clarinet, and the electric bass.

Celaine, who will be a fifth grader at Tenth Street Elementary this fall, hopes to participate in Odyssesy of the Mind again, as well as the Lego Robotics Competition.

From the sounds of it, she may be doing so for a long time.

“I want to become a robotics engineer and go to CMU,” Celaine said. “The program helped me to learn that I liked to work with robots."

For more information, check out these websites:

http://www.gswpa.org/

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/

http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/