Number 5! Last weekend we hosted our fifth Virtual Girls into coding event. This time around there were five different workshops (instead of the 4 previously) that the girls could choose from.
We had almost 30 girls attending the Zoom event, it was really encouraging to see such a great range of girls dedicating their Sunday afternoon to exploring technology.
In addition to my Microbit robot workshop we also had:
Crawl bot
Robot simulator
3D design
Robots & behaviour
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).
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. She recently joined our Girls Into Coding team as a mentor and is a mechanical design engineer for industrial automation. Good job 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.
And in our final workshop led by Llewelyn, the “Crawl Bot”, 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!
A huge, huge thank you to Sam, Llewelyn, Graham & Ben for planning and delivering such great workshop experiences at the virtual event.
Twins Alanna & Isabella, who had previously only participated in this type of activity as part of a large group, really made the most of the opportunity to get some valuable hands-on experience with electronics, making, and coding and continued to explore the robotics kits even after the virtual session. Mum has said that they are both now looking forward to some more coding opportunities at school next term.
Thank you, Sara, Shanaj & Carin for sharing the behind the scene snapshots of your daughters!
After the workshop sessions, all of the girls returned from the five workshop breakout rooms, and we were joined by our fabulous guest speakers, Isabella Gottardi & Hannah Blair. For me it was really great to see Isabella again, she was one of my mentors on a recent Tech for Good project that I worked on with 3 other young people, part of the GenArm2Z program.
Our first talk was delivered by Hannah Blair. Hannah is a Senior Frontend Developer at Hopin and founder of vrcalm, building impactful tech through Web/Mobile, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and UI and UX.
She is the Winner of Sky’s Technology Scholarship ‘17, featured in the Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and Sky News for my healthtech VR project, vrcalm, helping people with dementia. (www.vrcalm.co.uk)
Part of the London Transformative Tech Committee, supporting entrepreneurs disrupting wellbeing and healthcare. Empowering and supporting Women in STEM through work with Stemettes, Adas List, She++ London, and CodeFirst:Girls.
Hannah talked about Tech for good and building things that help humanity.
Our other guest speaker Isabella Gottardi, delivered a talk about ‘How technology and in particular CV (computer vision) and ML (machine learning) have changed over the years and are now applied to our daily life’.
Isabella is currently working as Software Engineer at Arm within the Machine Learning group. Together with her team, they develop code samples and demos to showcase the impact that machine learning can have in our daily life and guide developers to achieve the best performance on Arm powered platforms.
She is a passionate supporter of STEM and women in technology and worked as a mentor for the GenArm2Z project that supports the Global Goals and young into coding.
After the talks, everybody had the chance to ask questions, interact with Hannah and Isabella, and find out more about their tech journeys and motivations. It was very inspiring!
A big thank you to Isabella and Hannah for the enlightening and inspiring talks.
I really enjoyed being part of the day and I was humbled by the fantastic turnout. So proud of what we all achieved together on the day. Well done everyone!
Congratulations to Chloe for winning the quiz. Hope you like the book.
A big thank you to Arm, for supporting us in our mission to get more girls into tech and for sponsoring the event.
We always enjoy reading your feedback, as it’s important to identify what we should do again, but also what we can improve 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!