afterword (Ira's blog)

Technology Powered by Women (Conference for Girls)

It has been too long since my previous (and only) blog entry, which I did way back in 2005. I won't let this sort of a lapse happen again.

Last Saturday (March 3rd, 2007), I was invited to give the keynote for the "Technology Powered by Women" conference held in Kansas City (actually Liberty, which is a suburb of KC). This NSF (National Science Foundation) sponsored conference was organized by the William Jewel College SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) team and the Girl Scouts organization. The 1-day event was for middle- and high-school girls, aged 12 to 18. The goal was to motivate young women to consider pursuing technology careers (if they enjoy science and math) by providing a positive exposure to the same. Parents were also invited to attend. The conference was closed to registration, a couple of days before the actual event, after the number of registrants reached 70. This was the number that had been planned for (also, there were no more T-shirts left to give away ;-)). About 30 parents also attended.

I was a bit nervous about the keynote. I had never spoken in a public forum to an audience of young women, about how exciting technology is and why they should pursue a career in this field, if that is where their passion lies ... as opposed to giving in to a myriad of discouraging factors, including peer pressure and discouragement in general at home and at school. Today, women make up only about 28% of the technology workforce, so this is indeed a serious issue.

The keynote went well, judging by the response I got from the audience, both in terms of Q&A, as well as the many individuals (both girls and parents) who came up to talk to me afterwards. I am very pleased.

After the keynote, four concurrent workshops were held on ALICE programming, Lego Mindstorm, web design and a panel discussion on career opportunities in information technology. The first three workshops provided hands-on experience to the attendees. These workshops were conducted by women professors and professionals from the Kansas City area, including high school girls! Yes, that was awesome. Three high school girls - Jackie Thompson, Katherine Meinig and Katherine Kennedy - conducted the Lego Mindstorm workshop. These remarkable girls are part of the PantherRobotics team in Paola, Kansas. Two of their team teachers, Kathy Shirk and Luci Kennedy, also accompanied them.

I partially attended each of the workshops, spending most of my time in the Lego Robotics one. The attendees were divided into three groups, with the three group leaders from PantherRobotics. Each team programmed their robots to try and move as many cans of Pringles chips as they could in 2 minutes, from a large circular area. They were given about an hour to accomplish this, culminating in a competition between the three teams. The group leaders led their newbie (to Lego Robotics) teams through this competition, teaching them the basic concepts of programming and logic, using iterative trial and error techniques, and encouraging each of their young team members to participate actively. The team members got into it right away, and it was amazing to see the looks of excitement and pleasure as they witnessed their programs working, even partially. What better way to teach young girls about technology than through slightly-older-than-them girls who were masters at atleast one aspect of it! As often happens with experiments, some things went wrong, but these group leaders knew exactly how to recover and continue. Finally, they also taught their teams that having fun in a competition was more important than winning.

All in all, I had a great time at the conference, both giving the keynote, and watching young women having hands-on experience with technology that they seemed to enjoy tremendously.

Posted at 11:12AM Mar 07, 2007 by Ira Pramanick in General  |  Comments[0]