Sadie Hess, a fourth-grader at Creekside Ele­men­tary School, wants girls around the world to know they have power.

“I think some girls think they can’t do things,” she said. “I keep telling them, ‘You can do anything you want to do.”

Hess and about 25 other girls from Hardin County Schools gathered Wednesday at the Ear­ly College and Career Center for Girl Powered, a robotics workshop. The elementary and middle school students heard from a guest speaker and learned about goal-setting before building a marshmallow tower and playing with robots.

EC3 held the workshop in partnership with Vex Robotics. It was organized by high school students in the Vex Robotics program.

It was one of more than 100 Girl Powered workshops held across the country Wednesday to celebrate International Day of the Girl. Girl Powered is an initiative of the Robotics Edu­cation and Competition Foundation that works to close the gender gap in robotics, science, technology, engineering and math.

“Girl Powered is about doubling the number of girls in STEM. We can’t do that without you,” said Lucy Sonsalla, a junior at John Hardin High School who worked with other high school students to plan the workshop.

The girls led various sessions, assisted with activities and showed the stu­dents how to work the robots.

Sonsalla spoke with participants about setting goals and how to achieve them because part of the workshop focuses on helping students become self-sufficient.

“There’s only so much others can do for you,” she said.

Sonsalla said plenty of girls are interested in robotics and STEM, but some question if they can succeed in the fields. She said a goal of the workshop was to show them they can and how to do it.

“The whole point of Girl Powered is girls can do it too,” she said.

Jason Neagle, the Project Lead the Way teacher at EC3, said he’s seen a steady increase in the number of girls joining the Vex Robotics program. At the elementary level, he said enrollment in the Vex IQ program is about half girls and half boys.

Harper Jones, a fourth-grader at Creek­side, attended the workshop because she wants to be in Vex.

“I thought it was cool how you learn to build a robot and to code,” said Harper, who wants to work with computer software.

 Harper worked with Sadie and Rachel Rey­nolds, a fifth-grader at Rineyville Elementary School, to build a tower of uncooked pasta. They had tape and string to help with the structure. The tower had to support a jumbo marshmallow.

“I thought it would be easy, but turns out, it’s not,” Sadie said.

Sadie said she’s applied for the Vex IQ program at Creekside and hopes to join. She said her favorite part of the workshop was hearing from Haleh Karimi from Sullivan College. Karimi worked in the information technology industry and talked about the lack of women in her career field.

“That should change,” Sadie said.

Sadie said she wants to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps and work for Gates Corp. But she said she wants to go higher and work with blueprints.

“Some girls think only boys can do it,” she said. “To me, that’s not what you should think.”