Foxcroft School's commitment to innovative math and science education for girls will be on display Saturday, April 4, when the Middleburg, VA, school hosts the Ferrell McClean Math/Science Competition and a special presentation on women in engineering by a representative of Georgia Institute of Technology, which has one of the top engineering schools in the U.S.

Sandra Song, associate director of Tech's Women in Engineering Program, will speak about opportunities for women in engineering at 7 p.m. in Foxcroft's Currier Library. Tech produces more female engineers than any other university in the nation. The presentation and reception following are open to the public, especially high school girls who are interested in math and science, and their families.

The Ferrell McClean Math/Science Competition, which debuted last year as a Foxcroft-only contest, this year includes teams of girls from Notre Dame, Highland, and Madeira Schools. It begins at 1 p.m. and spectators are welcome.

Working in teams of three or four, students will vie for prizes based on their performance in a variety of fun and offbeat math, science and engineering challenges. The challenges are new and different each year but in 2008 they included activities such as "Murder She Wrote," in which students solved murders using logical deduction and "One More Brick in the Wall," in which students tried to build the widest wall possible on a base of just one brick. Other challenges had such titles as "To Precipitate or Not to Precipitate" and "Science & Math Jeopardy." More than 60 girls participated last year.

Foxcroft students take far more math and science, on average, than high school students nationally, especially girls. In the most recent graduating class, 90 percent of the girls took four or more years of math and 81 percent took at least four years of science. In addition to seven Advanced Placement courses in these subjects, the outstanding curriculum includes electives in statistics, anatomy, astronomy, environmental science, food chemistry and molecular biology.

The Foxcroft Summer Science research Institute, a special six-week program that gives young women with a special interest in the biological sciences the chance to participate in groundbreaking, university-level research projects, will make its debut in June. For more information on that program, contact Science Department Chair and Institute Director Julie Ervin at jervin@foxcroft.org or call 540.687.5555.