This past weekend I participated in the Technovation Challenge Mentorship Training. The challenge is run by Iridescent Learning, and the mission is
major block to women entering technical fields, and that we need to focus more on getting women interested at the "beginning of the line" (high school and earlier) rather than only at the "end of the line" (careers and conferences).
Toward this end, I'm participating in this 9-week process as a mentor to a group of high school girls who were recruited across high schools primarily in Oakland, California.
The women who ran the session were also incredibly prepared and organized given that this is only the second year they're running the program. They walked the mentors and TAs through various "design thinking" exercises (the kind of thing we do here at EchoUser daily), which seemed quite helpful to the majority of participants who had never heard of concepts like "the difference between observation and interpretation" and "ideation."
Finally, we took a spin through Google's AppInventor, and quickly put together several little Android applications, using little Android phones provided (in picture on the left). I've been interested in visual coding languages and MIT's Scratch for quite some time now, as a means to create a more inclusive programming environment, so I'm looking forward to spending more time with this application.
To promote women in technology by giving girls the skills and confidence they need to be successful in computer science and entrepreneurship. In the course, students design a mobile phone app prototype, write a business plan, and “pitch” their plan to a panel of venture capitalists at a high-visibility, “Pitch Night” event. Winners of each regional Pitch Night will come to the San Francisco Bay Area for a “National Pitch Night.”I was very inspired by the training, I feel that this nonprofit is coming at the issue of a lack of "women in tech" in a lot of the right ways. In a previous post, I mentioned the fact that confidence is a
major block to women entering technical fields, and that we need to focus more on getting women interested at the "beginning of the line" (high school and earlier) rather than only at the "end of the line" (careers and conferences).
Toward this end, I'm participating in this 9-week process as a mentor to a group of high school girls who were recruited across high schools primarily in Oakland, California.
The women who ran the session were also incredibly prepared and organized given that this is only the second year they're running the program. They walked the mentors and TAs through various "design thinking" exercises (the kind of thing we do here at EchoUser daily), which seemed quite helpful to the majority of participants who had never heard of concepts like "the difference between observation and interpretation" and "ideation."
Finally, we took a spin through Google's AppInventor, and quickly put together several little Android applications, using little Android phones provided (in picture on the left). I've been interested in visual coding languages and MIT's Scratch for quite some time now, as a means to create a more inclusive programming environment, so I'm looking forward to spending more time with this application.