Virtual Girls Into Coding # 21 -October 10th 2021

Girls Into Coding #21. This event in particular was definitely one of my favourites and one of the most rewarding to run. I can’t wait to delve into some of the many highlights.

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To kick the event off I introduced all the mentors, the event agenda, including the speakers who would be joining us later. After all introductions and explanations were out the way, everyone was assigned to their different breakout rooms, where the workshops would virtually take place.

The four different workshops of the event included :

• The Crawlbot – The Crawlbot session was delivered by Llewelyn. The participants had to build a 2-legged crawling robot. Then attach a Microbit controller, use MakeCode blocks to code the legs to move in a lifelike manner.
• The Robot Arm – Led by Ben. The girls built a 3D printed robot arm and learnt how to make it move. In the workshop, they learnt about all the components and what they do. They learnt about how to position the robot arm using code (this is called Kinematics), and then they coded the robot arm so that they could experience and understand how this works in real life! They used Micropython for this activity.
• Exploring 3D Design – Graham led this workshop. It was designed to get the girls quickly up to speed on core skills, best practices – while having an opportunity to explore Blender, SketchUp, Sculptris & TinkerCAD.
• And lastly my new IoT workshop!: The IoT Robot. 

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As I previously mentioned this event held many highlights. I got to deliver my first IoT workshop, which was a personal highlight for me. The idea of presenting an IoT-based workshop had been in the making for a while. Along the way, I had the opportunity to partner with Sylwester Bala from Things on Edge and Ignacio Siccardi from RosarIoT to help me to shape how this workshop and another series of IoT workshops would run. Some of you may be familiar with IoT, if not, it stands for Internet of Things and it is a system of physical devices connected to the internet. These physical devices are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies. They exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet.  My workshop was based on IoT and the device we used to collect data was called the ‘Cricket’. The IoT Cricket is a Wi-Fi module consuming ultra-low power. It enables you to build various IoT devices in a few minutes. It has been designed by Things On Edge.

Around a couple of months ago when I was figuring out what exactly I wanted to include in the new workshop, I knew that I wanted there to be a robot building, coding, and of course an IoT element of the workshop. And so that’s exactly what I included. There was a ton of different stages of preparation to get through during the holidays. As you’d expect, a new set of robot chassis and hardware needed to be readied. As well as this, there were some less obvious & unexpected little tasks. For example, I soldered colour-coded pins onto the ‘Cricket’ to aid the wiring up process. The plastic base of each pin had to be carefully modified (filed down) in order to fit correctly onto the cricket, before soldering each one.  I also had the chance to help develop a cool little laser printed case to help mount the cricket IoT device to the robot, prepare the workshop instruction sheets, and carry out several tests and modifications to the robot to make sure everything was set for our October 10th event!

The first half of the session involved building, wiring up, and coding the robot to simply move in response to different radio signals.

In the second part of the session, we injected a bit of IoT. I started off with a presentation about IoT and its different applications and guided the girls on how to add the cricket IoT device to their robots. Moving on to the workshop, the girls had to connect their ‘Cricket’ device to the internet. Knowing how tricky internet connections can be, I was really hoping that all would still run smoothly. And, to my surprise, everyone managed to successfully connect their ‘Cricket’ up to the internet, which definitely reassured me that this workshop would turn out to be a success!

After the tricky bit had passed we logged onto a cloud service called Adafruit io. On this platform, everyone could monitor live data being sent from each other’s robots via the cricket IoT device. The ‘Cricket’ has a number of sensors that pick up different types of data, for this workshop, the ‘Cricket’ was collecting temperature and battery level readings from the robots.

What was really fun and interactive was how the participants were able to go to different areas of their houses, to get different temperature readings. Some maneuvered their robot next to windows where the sun shone, others took their robots to colder spots, even the fridge wasn’t off-limits.. as long as they didn’t keep it in there for too long. Ahhah. While the robots explored these different locations the graphs started showing some interesting results. The temperature readings shot up then back down when the temperature began to drop suddenly. I think the girls and me included, had lots of enjoyment working through the workshop and I can’t wait to run another.

Following the excitement of this first IoT experience, we had an extension activity for the workshop! This was to attach a neopixel light ring to the robot, and then code it to emit a specific colour depending on the robot’s direction of travel.

After the workshops slowly came to an end, all the attendees were transferred back into the main room, everyone seemed energized and ready for what was next. We were joined by two guest speakers who shared their inspiring stories & insights while interacting with the girls through a live Q & A session. The speakers (you can find their full bio on our Speaker page) who joined us were:

Apoorva Panidapu  

Apoorva is a young mathematician, artist, social entrepreneur, and advocate for youth in STEAM. She has written and co-authored several research publications, working alongside world-renowned mathematicians.

Apoorva talked about how to power Innovation with STEM and Creativity.

Tara Walker  

Tara is a Principal Software Engineer on the Azure IoT product group. Her goal is to help developers of all walks of life realise they can not only become great engineers but Inventors of the next “Big Thing” that may change the world.

Tara talked about her Tech Journey of a Black Geek Girl.

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I’d like to say a massive thank-you to Apoorva and Tara for speaking at my event. The passion and enthusiasm you guys brought was priceless. On top of this, the girls were extremely eager to ask questions, which is exactly the positive impact we want to see! Thank you so much for coming.

For the last part of the event, we held our traditional interactive quiz. Congratulations to Joanna, who won a coding kit!

I would like to say a BIG THANK YOU to Sylwester and Ignacio for their insights and guidance and a SPECIAL THANK YOU to Red Hat our sponsor for this event. Without this type of support, we could not continue doing what we do.

What’s next?

Aside from this IoT workshop, I am planning to launch another set of IoT experiences, this time using the ‘Cricket’ with IBM Node-Red. Stay Tuned!

Thank you everyone and can’t wait for the next event!

Avye