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.

Lego!

Lego’s mindstorm is a very cool line of robots, sensors and software to run them. They are not cheap, but very versatile. We think that having a workshop where girls can program their own robot would be a satisfying experience.

David from Lego showed his robots at a meeting today. There are many sensors and motors available.

The main thing is that these robots are not only machines with some software that you put together and program. You use them the monitor the environment, make repetitive tasks easier and so on. You need them for biology, gardening – experiments with light sensors, pH sensors for plant growth. Even for ESL classes they are useful – when kids cooperate on a robot building job, they have to communicate. First you learn “wheel”, …

Interesting Article

The Washington Post has an article that mentions Microsoft's DigiGirlz.

The comments contain one disheartening entry

Having spent 40 years in high-tech fields from radar systems to financial systema and everything in between, not many girls have that much interest in tech as a career. At least none of my girls nor their girlfriends did. The motivation is just simply not there.

and one good one regarding CMU's Alice:

Caitlin Kelleher, a graduate student at CMU who had Dr. Randy Pausch as her thesis adviser states, "As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling,"

Planning meeting in San Carlos, Aug/6

Laura, Ruth, Anne and Martin met in SC on August 6, 2009.

Laura and Ruth showed a sample sponsorship matrix. They are going to put together a sponsorship package in the next couple days. This package will have to be presented to Intel, Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Apple,  IBM etc real soon. They’ll send the result to Martin for publishing on the web site. The next step will be to approach sponsor companies.

Naming  and ownership of the conference came up again. Apparently SAP would not sponsor an ACM conference. Laura and Ruth are going to go over names again. We need the name for the sponsors and for an upcoming web site.

As for locations we think that foothill college is probably the best choice. It has one 200+ conference room and one 940 seat theater. The theater is only available in the morning.

Foothill College: Mike Murphy

Mike made Anne and me very welcome at our visit today. Foothill college is in a beautiful location in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Altos. The buildings are mostly single-story shingle-covered with rooms for 30 students on tables or 50 people on chairs. There are two or more 200-person auditoriums and one 940-person theatre that will be occupied on February 27 in the afternoon. There is also a cafeteria that could do catering and boxed lunches in a central location. This location would be a safe and spacious environment for the conference. The only drawbacks may be that it’s either 200 or 900 people…. but then we could have two 200-person keynote rooms.

Cost is a minor issue, and may run in the low 1000s.

There is also the Kraus center for innovation with a very nice interior architecture and nice workspaces for group projects.

Mike also has contacts at Apple and Cisco and will try to get us in touch.

Intel

Bev Bachmeyer, Intel, International. Academic relations, ACM. Used to run Intel/SAP lab in Walldorf.

Sat Feb 27 2010.

Open to local school districts, girls scouts get seats.

Held event for young girls (13-17) in Germany, 5 days, building a PC. Installed windows, “moodle” programming, how world looks in 20 years. Effective listening classes, presentation skills. Friday presented their projects. Most successful: women engineers sat at tables during lunch.

Bev has a lot of interest in the subject. Could do sponsoring. Needs package from Ruth. $5k for Platinum quickly, because budget is in the works.

Speakers: have multitude of women in the subject.

Will set up meeting with global group Thursday how they could help out. We can even use her as a contact. Might move support to corporate technology group.

Intel has a lot of experience with that – modeled it after Google.

Girls were very interested, and was a big success. Main thing is giving young girls opportunity to meet engineers working in the field. Role models.

Bev needs:

• specifics on sponsorships.
• speakers they can provide. February is not so far away.

Bev is interested in attending meetings by phone until 1pm or after 9pm PST. Can even get someone from the US team to help out.

Lots of help from Microsoft

Kenny Spade from Microsoft is helping us to connect to the people that organize DigiGirlz a travelling conference. He is also getting us in touch with Lego  - who make the amazing Mindstorm robots, which would make a really nice breakout session. He had great ideas for doing breakouts on other topics, like building video games for the XBox. We have to start working on the speaker roster and the program.

Kenny did a lot of work with Foothill college, who seem to be interested in working with us. We will meet Mike Murphy soon.