New year, same awesome club!

First club meeting. Check.

Start coding. Check.

Pass out free Swag Bags. Check.

Last Sunday was our club’s first session — and it was awesome. This year, we’re in the library’s brand new tech lab, where there’s trusty wifi, a massive screen to project our beautiful code, and even a 3D printer (that we might be able to play with)!

After breaking the ice and completing our programming assessment, every girl got their own Girls Who Code “Swag Bag.”

Then to the fun part…

Since we are still searching for a teacher, I started with teaching the basics, that is, simple animations using the javascript library called Processing. After ironing down the kinks of downloading a compatible text editor on our computers and creating a specific processing folder, we began our “Drawing circle” code, where randomly sized and randomly colored circles appeared wherever the computer’s cursor was.

Since all of the girls came with different programming experience, we started off slow and steady. First the background, then the circles, then the colors, then the details.

After the girls fixed all the syntax errors, they were amazed with the final output. Alexis, a 16 year old first time coder, says that “seeing the final product was beyond rewarding!” Erin, a more experienced coder, posted and shared her creation on her Snapchat story right away.

By the end of the year, our goal is to empower girls in the club by giving them the power to code and to feel confident in themselves. We hope to learn new languages, go on field trips, and hear from powerful #GirlBosses.

More updates to come!

 

From Java Labs to Android Apps

By : Malia Smith

“Hey Axel, please tell me 1 + 1 somehow equals 9.27183….”

These past few weeks the SMUHSD Girls Who Club has been working on making a functioning Calculator App in Android Studio, a task which has deemed itself much more difficult than expected.  Making this calculator was our first task using Android Studio.  Although we were comfortable coding in Java, Android Studio proved to be a more difficult task.  In this new editing studio we had to use slightly different syntax so that our program could run as an interactive phone application with lines such as “android.display.”  

Our first version of the calculator app we used an imported calculator library that facilitated the use of operator buttons so that we did not have to actually code any of the mathematical operations.  This wasn’t too difficult as we had the guidance of an online tutorial as well as our teachers.  However, the Calculator 2.0 was a different story.

This time, we had to hand-code all the mathematical operations, making the calculator app truly our own.  At first it seemed easy enough – after all, it’s just some addition and multiplication right?  However, what seemed such a simple task took much longer to code than we expected.  We realized that (sadly) computers do not think the same as humans and that we need to very explicitly write out exactly how the math should be performed.  Suddenly, simple addition was not quite so simple.  

We used many variables and casting in order to store the user input in a manner that the computer could understand.  We found this to be a challenging step, often times our program giving very outlandish answers (our calculator thought all problems equalled 9.27183???).  However, after a few weeks of scratching our heads, furious typing, a few tears, and many laughs, we coded our very own calculators!! Our first Android app!

 

What a NEAT field trip!

By : Maggie Chang

On November 25th, some of the girls from the club took a field trip to the Contemporary Jewish Museum for their Teen Takeover event. The event was free and open to all teens and displayed the limitless possibilities of programming. While some call refer to math and science as STEM, others refer to it as STEAM because of the strong relationship between Computer Science and art.

The NEAT, or New Art and Experiments in Technology, exhibit had a wide variety of artwork. Whether it was an 8 foot “moving” snake sculpture or an interactive dance floor that changes colors based on steps taken, club members were in awe of all the creations.

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From this field trip, attendees saw new art and how it merges with technology, had the opportunity to interact with the art itself, and broadened their horizon on what Computer Science could be applied to!

Welcoming 2015-2016!

It’s been a couple weeks since the 2015-2016 club started and we’ve already learned so much! With our new instructors, Apple Kernel engineer Axel Schumacher and Twitter software engineer Jenna Zhan Zhang, we have tackled topics including binary, bits and bytes, and computer science principles through Java. Although these are definitely challenging lessons, that’s why we come to the club: to push ourselves and think in new ways.

In addition to coding, we’ve begun a segment in which a club member presents a 5 minute slideshow on any technology topic they wish. This week we heard about female British mathematician of the 1800s Ada Lovelace, who is regarded as the first computer programmer for creating the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine! Guess it goes to show that girls have ruled CS since the 19th century.

Presenting Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.

The club has gotten off to a great start! Stay tuned for next week’s visit to NEAT, the New Experiments in Art and Technology Exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF.

Pyrotechnic Shipping Wizard Pays Us a Visit

Meena Shah, a spunky senior software engineer at Navis, came to speak to our club last week. She spoke to the 2013 GWC Summer Twitter Cohort and we hunted her down to come speak to our club. Thankfully, Meena and our instructor, Jen, are buddies from MIT, so hunting her down wasn’t as difficult as we thought it would be. Meena showed us that coding is truly applicable everywhere.

She began her presentation explaining her day job; she is a senior engineer at a shipping company (Navis) . Meena writes software that tackles shipping problems like “How can one fit 8,000 loaded shipping crates onto a boat without breaking it?” She proceeded to show us what would happen if her work went wrong and pulled up a multitude of broken boats on her Powerpoint. She explained how her work revolves around not just coding, but a heavy amount of math too (something that the vast majority of club members enjoy).

800 sq. ft. fire garden that Meena helped build for Burning Man.

Then, she threw us a curve ball. Meena was a part of two groups that built large scale fire art (The Flaming Lotus Girls and the Flux Foundation). These are both women’s groups who build the massive fire sculptures for major events like The Makers’ Fair and Burning Man. She primarily worked on the electric wiring, and helped with welding and programming in order to make these monstrous works of pyrotechnic art. Meena showed us how we can apply computer science in fun new ways. It turns out that we (though we are under-aged) can join these fire art groups, I can’t wait to see who does and who will be building the next 800-square-foot fire garden.

#womenyoushouldhaveheardof for International Women’s Day

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. Described as a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future”, International Women’s Day is actually a national holiday in some places like China, Russia and Vietnam. It was honored for the first time on March 19, 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, where more than one million women and men attended rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

As a club celebrating women and their achievements in the computer science, it seemed fit that we recognize this holiday and honor a few special females who made this field what it is today.


Not to forget great women who made history in other STEM fields, here are a few other women you should have heard of.

Images courtesy of IFLScience. You can learn more about International Women’s Day here.

When the club takes on HSHacks II

This past weekend, many of the (Level Three) club members attended HSHacks II, the nation’s largest Hackathon for high school students hosted at PayPal’s TownHall. For most of us, it was our first Hackathon and we learned a variety of things ranging from learning new tricks to truly feeling the weirdness of the gender gap in technology.

While at the Hackathon, we got to get our hands on fancy tech items, including things like the Oculus Rift (where we got to play a few minutes of a 3D virtual reality game), to the Pebble watch, to playing with MaKey MaKeys, all for the first time. We got easy access to mentors who were more than willing to help us with problems with our code and teach us new skills. We attended workshops on iOS development and got working on apps too. After the weekend we walked out with three fun projects; a pirate parody of tinder, a cheesy pick-up line generator, and a chrome extension that has a defining tool for when someone hovers over a word on Wikipedia. In the grand scheme of things, we were beginners in comparison to the people who won prizes; a team created drones to act somewhat like pets that mimic one’s actions (link here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17f5q0rBE0M ), but it was still an awesome experience and a great step for all of us in our CS endeavors.

Since most of us girls have only coded in comfortable and supportive environments so far, this was the first time we felt strange in a tech environment. There were over 1000 participants at the Hackathon, and maybe 60 (a high estimate) were girls. Many of the boys were respectful and willing to help when we needed it or vice versa, but some were not sure why we were there, and a few acted like it was the weirdest thing seeing girls actually do something cool in a male-dominated field! We GWC veterans went about doing our projects the same way we always do—with pride and passion. The founders of HSHacks noted the gender gap, and brought in a “Women in Tech Panel” that brought together all of the girls (and many of the boys) to reaffirm that girls can kick some ass in tech no matter what the opposite sex might say. We met some really inspirational women, like Tracy Chou (from Pinterest) and Crystal Lee (Stanford grad, Miss California 2013, and now from Google).

Overall, this was an exciting experience. We began learning new languages like Swift and C++, got to play with things we haven’t messed around with before, and made a bunch of new friends and contacts in the tech world. Though there were not that many girls at the event, we had a great time hacking, bonding, and eating junk food.

 

Lovely Ada Lovelace, a “Female Genius”

Some CS trivia as the Level 1 girls move from Scratch to work with JavaScript. Level 3 members are participating in High School Hacks II this weekend.

Ada was Lord Byron’s daughter. But her mother, Anna Isabella Byron, detested the poet after they separated and pushed her into math and science to inoculate her against any Byronic tendencies. She may not have succeeded because they say Ada wrote poetically about programming. Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace) is seen as the world’s first computer programmer who worked with Charles Babbage on his computer, the Differential machine.

When Ada was 12, she wanted to fly. She systematically studied birds, looked into material to build wings and wrote an illustrated guide called “Flyology”. She had the same imagination when she grew older and met Mr. Babbage who was building the first computer. Ada wrote an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers. But it was never tested because they didn’t build the Analytical machine where it could run. She died at 36 from cancer, the same age as her famous father.

Ada is a computer language created by the US Department of Defense.

Some inspiration from Lady Lovelace

 

And here’s her Google doodle.

Geeks, nerds and the digital divide

On Martin Luther King day I started thinking about the digital divide. The term digital divide refers to the gap between the under privileged members of society who don’t have access to computers and the internet, and the others who do. The digital divide is mainly attributed to differences in socio-economic factors. Most of the time people are interested in differences related to education, income and race.  It is a vicious cycle because being on the wrong side of the divide reduces your chances of getting the education and income you need to move to the other side.

Gender has been a powerful indicator of whether you are on the wrong side of the divide. Women are under-represented in technology. Girls Who Code is one of the organizations trying to bridge the divide to help women reach gender parity by 2020 by exposing a million girls to computer science (we need 4.6 million girls in CS). There are others like Kimberly Bryant who started Black Girls Who Code after being an only and lonely engineering girl of color in college, and wants to get 1 million girls of color into Computer Science by 2040. Our district-wide Club in Burlingame has done a small part by bringing 40 girls a year to CS.

Are you a geek or a nerd? This was a question posed by a college in their application. I cringed at the terms and question. Part of the reason girls stay away from tech is because of the stereotypes that tech is for boys and getting into it makes you strange in some way. But when I Googled the words to get a good definition of them, I realized I’d be happy being either one if I could take away the social ineptness tagged to the definition! A geek is someone who is non-mainstream, enthusiastic and intellectual, a digital tech expert. A nerd (a word created by Dr. Seuss) is someone who is into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The summer immersion program at GWC and our coding club work for us because girls are socially inclined, work together in teams, and have a good time getting things done. The New York Times article from this weekend (Why some teams are smarter than others, Jan 16) says that women make a team smarter because of their social skills; how much smarter would girls make teams with their social and geek skills combined? By next MLK day we should be a bit closer to bridging the divide and learning the answer.

Wearable technology – what can we develop with code?

When my grandmother was recovering from her heart surgery we worried about leaving her alone. She is very independent and we found a start-up with a “magic watch” which she wore when she went out walking by herself. It was cool – had a video that could be activated from our phone so we could call and see where she was. It made her feel good! Unfortunately, the start-up folded. Now she’s hoping for an IWatch!

Since then I have been reading more about wearable technology. There are a whole range of devices already that we use to monitor health, track daily fitness results and set goals, and capture amazing video footage anywhere (E.g. Fitbit, GoPro). These include products pedometers, smart watches, sport watches, fitness trackers and action camcorders.

In Delaware the university designed a onesie called Playskin Lift with sensors for a baby with physical disabilities where they combined a techie trunk to Spanks.

Then there is a company called Cuff, which makes wearable jewelry that can be a safety device for women out alone, or for medical alerts a bit like the smart watch. You can program a bunch of numbers to call if you have a problem by pressing a button.

This makes me wonder. When Robotics Clubs hack Rumbas to do fun stuff, what can we hack with wearable tech?

Google Canada hosted a wearable tech hack for Next 36. The Cyborgs, from McMaster University, won with their TipsyLock, which has a mandate “to keep everyone safe.” After realizing the effect of alcohol consumption on brain wave patterns, the team “leveraged the power of the Muse to sense pattern changes and integrated the authentication capabilities of the Nymi to effectively create a platform that prevents impaired driving by locking the driver out of their vehicle.”

Wearable tech