Web sites for women and girls

 

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_girls.html

 

 

Women-Related Web Sites in Science/Technology

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_sci.html

Speaker Proposal

We will need around 30 sessions, some may be held twice during the day, but that’s a lot. We also need to be careful in picking speakers so we get the perfect mix of talks – inspiring and calling to action, instructive and hands-on. We will have to recruit a number of speakers ideally out of a larger group. So the idea is to ask potential speakers for proposals about their talk or hands-on session they want to give.

Below a try to come up with a form we could use for speakers session proposals:

Speaker name:

Location:

Company/affiliation:

web sites:

Other useful things to know:

Title of the session proposed:

Description of session:

Time frame for session (30-90 min?):

Ideal age:

Prerequisites to attend:

Space requirements (open floor, desks, computers, outside):

Other equipment needed (PCs, etc) and cost:

Is there someone else who can hold the session in case speaker is unable?

What are the projected expenses for the talk (travel required? transportation, lodging) – guesstimate items:

Have you held the session before? Are there descriptions/recordings?

Phone Meeting - October 16

Anne, Khalia, Martin

Topic areas: arts, games, science, robotics, life sciences, environments, social media, movies, music, security (Symantec), finance (Intuit)

3 slots for workshops. 30 seats per workshop. 10-15 workshops happening at one time. 30-45 workshops. Girls sign up ahead of time for workshop.

Lynn giving train the trainer session before.

We need a speaker signup questionnaire proposal TODO/M. (abstract, bio, travel, housing, time for ttt, …)

Put out an RFP for speakers?

Recording sessions? Legal implications.

Speakers from startup community?

Open source speakers?

What do we want? Teach programming.

Need to define speaker profile! TODO/M! Age, looks, mental state, --- ask daughters!

Sign-up website. Ask Elizabeth F. TODO/M! Define requ. Pick tracks, download legal papers.

Parent track: share what happened at Sacramento.

Have new web site: http://sites.google.com/site/dare2bdigitalconf/

Ruth back Monday. Anne back Nov 2.

Dawn – website? organize? volunteer recruiting? Mike M.

Expanding Your Horizons – Oct 10 – Trip Report

I took my daughter to this conference on the Sacramento state campus. We signed up online and paid $20 per person attending.
They had a parking structure reserved for the attendees right next to the student union where the conference was held in a large conference room. There was a checkin-area for the kids with 3 lines for name ranges, and another line for kids, one for mentors and a room for the volunteers. The kids received a little backpack filled with schwag and papers, the adults an ATT plastic bag with a notebook. You also got a conference badge in plastic on a string.

They had a lot of volunteers! Each attendee was assigned to a table. Each table had a volunteer. There were other volunteers for handing out food and just standing around and managing the crowds. The table group volunteers took their group through the conference sessions and lunch.

There was a short introduction by one of the organizers who is currently attending college there and then a keynote speech by a professor who is investigating healing various conditions using stem cells. She was talking about her career, how she got to lead the institute and showed short movies of her research and pictures from the new  institute they were building. Attendees asked some questions about stem cells and they were hard to hear because there were no microphones in the room. 

 

The parents had their own tables in the back of the room. We listened to the keynote and then went to one of the lecture rooms upstairs. I attended both lectures that were offered: an introduction on how to prepare for college (“start at birth”) that was very informative and one about gender bias and how to overcome  it when talking to your daughter. At the second lecture there was even a prize: a day-use ticket for a state park. The speakers were an admissions/outreach person and biology professors from the university there.
Lunch was a choice of three different wraps and water and iced tea. Quite simple. I heard no one complain.
Katarina had picked two sessions, one where you were experimenting with artificial blood – identifying blood groups and one where they were shown non-vegetarian plants. She said she liked another conference at the college of San Mateo better that she attended with her school. She said the difference was that they had more sessions.

 

The conference was sponsored by “women of AT&T”. I talked to one of the organizers, Dawn Fritz, also from AT&T who was of course interested in D2BD and even said they might sponsor us. I also talked to the main event organizer and left my card with her. They have done this event three times now and the level of organization is evident. There were few lines and always a  volunteer close by. I did not see anything that not handled perfectly.
At the end of the sessions the students were dropping off their evaluation sheets and received a raffle ticket. I did not see what the prizes were. At the ending session the same student that did the introductions asked students about their experiences.

I think the whole conference was a good experience. It was well organized and informative. I am considering going to the next one in San Francisco November 21.

Meeting with Microsoft kids/college

Anne and me had a great meeting with Lynn, Llewlyn (Falco) and Kenny today. This was very productive, and a bit scary.

Lynn has a lot of experience doing workshops with children and running events like we are planning to do. I got so much information it is overwhelming so I am trying to put it down here for posterity.

1h sessions are the maximum. Much longer and people will wonder out. You need to make sure there is some movement during or between sessions.

‘Job shadows’ were an especially successful type of session – a professional has a question and answer meeting with a not-too-large number of girls, asking questions.

The best speakers are young, and cool. No suits. The girls have to be able to relate to the women and picture themselves in their shoes.

Lecture style sessions work only for a short time, it is good to have interactivity mixed in. One idea was to have kids give interviews. The instructors can be males and females mixed, but the females should be in the ‘boss’ role. This sends a clear message to the girls that they can achieve something in this profession.

Lynn has taught a number of programming classes to kids before:

Small basic – is a language like Logo. It has simple statements that control a graphical ‘turtle’ that draws on the screen.

Alice – is a children’s programming language that is now also being used in 10% of university classes.

Storytelling Alice – is a simplified Alice build by Caitlin Kelleher during her thesis work. Caitlin is a great resource, she is studying how children learn and know a lot of people. Lynn will make a connection for us.

Kodu – a graphical/visual programming language that uses an Xbox controller. Kenny says he could borrow a number of Xboxes for a class!

XA games, robotics. Kodu is made up from objects that have properties and one can specify when-do action responses.

Lynn also has great contacts: Thomas Müller, a Lego instructor, who could give mindstorm classes. Robert Rasmussen from Denmark, who also works in robotics. Kahlia Hewlin who is running “She’s Geeky” at the CHM every year.

It would also be possible to have a competition either with robots or with code (robocode, e.g) but that has to be handled carefully to not bring out undesirable fights.

 

An interesting visualization experiment is having the girls close their eyes, have them think of a programmer, a geek, a technical person, visualize them. After some time tell them to open their eyes, introduce a group of women on the stage announce they are those people (“we are technical women”)

Another successful session is using unified communications (an MS technology) to connect the classroom to another classroom on campus, in another state or around the world! Check out this video AT 1:00 min!

She also suggested a journalist group touring the conference and publishing what’s going on on social networking sites. This includes video interviews with successful girls ideally in the age group.

Each 1h session is split up in 3 concepts 1) why and what 2) show 3) do it! During hands-on sessions you need at least 1 procter per 10 attendees that hover around and help out – university students for example. They keep faster students challenged and help stragglers move forward. The teacher has to be a high-energy person – it is okay to yell! The unexpected should happen and the teaching style should be loud and varied. Llewellyn mentioned the pomodore teaching technique.

How to prepare for the conference hands-on sessions? Ideally use some remote-desktop solution, like EC2 or Terminal Server using remote desktop (RDP). This way you can set up the software development environment before and only have to make sure it is accessible from the workstations. Or build a thumb-drive image for the workstations. Lynn wrote a paper about this…

Microsoft has a Dreamsparks program that allows anyone to get all the Microsoft development tools for free before college. It would be great for them to spread knowledge about that program.

The next Digigirlz program is in April 3, but Lynn is working on a more community-oriented program where teaching is supported and done by the local community.

Lynn proposes a ‘train the trainer’ session before the conference. She would be able to teach and make the TTT session happen.

Other ideas:

· Speed dating. Having professional women and girls rotate seats after a certain time. Show/tell/ask.

· Demo fest: show lego robots, Windows 7 multi-touch, ‘song smith’ music program

Lynn and Kenny will try to help sponsor the event with support from Microsoft.

Other links:

· Alan Kay TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_about_ideas.html

· The web site needs to have resource available for download. Videos of the event.

· UN imagine cup – help the UN reach millennium goals.