The Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania and Girl Scouts of the USA have 24 new badges.

The new badge areas are designed to help girls practice leadership in automotive engineering, STEM career exploration, entrepreneurship, and civics.

The new Girl Scout badges include:

¯ Entrepreneurship (kindergarten through 12th grades): girls develop an entrepreneurial mindset as they engage in age-appropriate exercises that help them create and pitch a product or service that solves a problem. They build their own business plan and think about topics like production, cost, profit, marketing, and competition.

¯ STEM Career Exploration (second through eighth grades): girls explore their career interests and connect them to STEM fields–particularly computer science, nature/environmental science, engineering, design, health, and agriculture–that can help them address the pressing issues of our time and change the world. The IF/THEN Collection, a free, downloadable digital asset library of real-life women in STEM, is an integral component of the badges.

¯ Automotive Engineering (kindergarten through fifth grades): girls learn about designing, engineering, and manufacturing vehicles, as well as the future of mobility. They design their own vehicles, test prototypes, learn about design thinking, create their own assembly line manufacturing process, and more.

¯ Civics (kindergarten through 12th grades): girls gain an in-depth understanding of how local, state, and federal government works, preparing them to be voters, activists and political leaders. They research laws and how they’re created, voting, and the electoral college, the representation of women in government, and more. They also research their own government officials and are encouraged to meet them.

“Now more than ever, it’s critical that we have strong leaders who can make informed decisions that make the world a better, safer place,” said GSUSA CEO Sylvia Acevedo. “During our current health crisis, the world leaders who have been among the most decisive and effective in addressing the pandemic have been women. With these new badge experiences in STEM, entrepreneurship, and the critically important subject of civics, Girl Scouts is continuing to build the transformational female leaders of today and the future and showing girls the power they have to truly change the world.”

For more information, visit gswpa.org/join.