December 13th, it was the last Girls Into Coding event of 2020! A special thank you to Angular London meetup for supporting us in our mission to get more girls into tech and for sponsoring the event!
We started off with a full house of participants, not forgetting the mentors, which was great to see! I welcomed everyone and shared the agenda of the day: the workshops, followed by our speakers, and traditionally ending with our quiz. But what the girls didn’t know was that as a Christmas Special we were going to have more than one winner, which meant more prizes to be won!
As for our workshops, we had: The Microbit Robot Workshop, The Crawl bot, The Robot simulator, 3D design, and the Robots & behaviour workshops.
In the “Microbit robot” workshop, we explored using motors and distance sensors with the Microbit and coded in Python. It was led by myself (Avye).
The “Crawl Bot” workshop was led by Llewelyn. The girls built a 2-legged crawling robot. They then attached a Microbit controller, the Adafruit Crickit, to it. They used MakeCode blocks to code the legs to move in a lifelike manner. Then coded the robot to respond to their touch!
In the “Robot simulator” session, the participants used lines of code to navigate their robot through a virtual environment. This workshop was led by Sam.
The “Robots & Behaviours” workshop was led by Ben. He gave a fun introduction to creating behaviours for robots. The participants used a robot simulator and programmed a robot with insect-like traits for moving around! They used the Python code.
In the “Exploring 3D Design” workshop, the girls had a great opportunity to design a model, which could go on to be 3D printed, this one was led by Graham.
A huge thank you once again to our mentors Sam, Ben, Llewelyn, and Graham, whom without, we wouldn’t be able to run our Girls Into Coding events, so Thank You!
And our wonderful speakers who joined us were Roma Agrawal and Kate Kallot.
Roma is a chartered structural engineer who has worked with signature architects during her fifteen-year career designing footbridges, towers, and sculptures; including six years as a senior structural engineer on The Shard, the tallest tower in Western Europe.
A multiple award winner, both for her technical prowess and her contribution to raising awareness of engineering as a career, Roma was given the ‘Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence’ by the Association for Consultancy and Engineering. She has appeared in documentaries and has been featured in many UK broadsheets, magazines, and online; on the BBC, ITV, has given two TEDx talks about engineering.
She actively promotes engineering, scientific and technical careers to young people and particularly to under-represented groups such as women.
Roma recently authored ‘Built: The hidden stories behind our structures’, released in the UK and USA in February 2018, with the aim to inspire an interest in engineering with the general public.
Roma’s talk was entitled “Building Bridges”
Kate recently joined NVIDIA as Head of Emerging Areas. In this role, Kate oversees strategic alliances and developer relations activities for emerging markets, segments, and use cases. She works closely with partners and influencers to create disruptive AI applications.
Prior to NVIDIA, Kate was previously at Arm where she was leading their AI ecosystem & developer relations team as well as founding and co-leading the Black@Arm network. Prior to that, she spent six years at Intel holding various product and business positions in AI, computer vision, and IoT, and developed the world’s first AI development kit in a USB form factor.
A D&I and mentorship advocate, regularly mentors teens, young girls career development but also startups on tech and business.
Kate has won multiple accolades throughout her career, including Business Insider Top 100 Business Transformers 2020, VentureBeat Women in AI Rising Star 2020, CES ‘Best of Innovation Award’, and the China AI Industry Innovation Alliance ‘Most Remarkable Product Award’ in 2018.
Kate talked about her Tech Journey and what she does in AI.
It was really evident that the girls were inspired by the speakers, by the number of questions they asked after the talk. It was awesome to see that as one girl put her hand up and asked a question two more hands would pop up. I think that presenting the girls with the opportunity to ask questions themselves to the speakers, definitely boosts their confidence and further enhances the feeling of community. We’ll definitely love to see much more of this in future events!
As I mentioned earlier, with Christmas on the horizon we had more winners and more prizes to be won in our interactive quiz. While each girl was typing, ticking, or determining which answer to pick, we could see that they all had one goal, which was to channel their prior and newly gained knowledge. For the girls who came top of the leaderboard, they were gifted a prize! The prizes included a Microbit V2 starter kit, a Python for beginner’s book, and a book about Inspiring Women.
It felt great being part of the event and to be among such a diverse group of girls. We were joined by a girl from the USA, adding to our growing list of international participants, including girls from Kenya, Nigeria, Spain, Ireland, and Canada. Once again, I’m really proud of what everyone achieved together.
I’d like to end by sharing some feedback that really made my day and reminded me of why we do what we do.
“The Microbit workshop has been xxx’s favourite GIC project by far – After the event, we did the whole pack over the week and she was delighted by being about to build her own “remote control robot” and fascinated to see how the robot could detect obstacles and navigate around them. She’s really keen to start building up her own collection of components and continue playing with a Microbit of her own, as well as perhaps build her own robot.”
The next Virtual Girls Into Coding event will be on January 10th, 2021. Bring it on!
Avye
Hi, my name is Avye and I love making, coding, designing, exploring new technology and swimming! This site is about the things I get to experience, discover and enjoy. Welcome to my world!