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.