Lately, educators have stressed the importance of attracting more girls to STEM areas of study (science, technology, engineering and math) — especially computer programming, since men outnumber women 7 to 3 in tech industry careers. But now, a group of researchers at South Carolina’s Clemson University have hit upon a unique way to spark girls’ interest in software engineering: through dance.
Dr. Shaundra Daily, an assistant professor of computing at Clemson who was the lead author in a study published in Technology, Knowledge and Learning, found that the computational skills of fifth and sixth grade girls improved after they interacted with dance choreography software. Daily hit upon this idea because she was a competitive dancer who now leads her own computer lab at Clemson.
Through the Virtual Environment Interactions (VEnvl) software, the girls were able to program three-dimensional characters to perform dance moves just by moving their own bodies. The girls learned to develop new computing strategies to improve their choreography.
Dr. Alison Leonard, an assistant professor of education at Clemson who co-authored the study, says in a press release that dance and software engineering have more in common than you might think: “Executing one bit of code or movement one after the other exists in both programming and choreography. Likewise, loops or repeating a set of steps, also occur in both contexts.”
One of the goals of Daily’s research is to determine how to encourage more girls to become involved with computing. “We want more diverse faces around the table, helping to come up with technological solutions to societal issues,” she says. “So we’re working with girls to create more pathways to support their participation.”
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Tag: Software Engineering
These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
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Think You Can Build an App That Saves the World From Asteroids?
If you’ve ever dreamed of saving the world from an impending asteroid collision, and you’ve got a better solution than hiring Bruce Willis to bomb the asteroid to smithereens, we’ve got the competition for you.
On April 12 and 13, during NASA’s third annual Space Apps Challenge, hundreds of scientists and software engineers joined together in a 48-hour hackathon to come up with solutions to vexing global and interstellar problems. NASA comes up with the puzzlers for the event, and anybody with the engineering chops to work on them is invited to try. Teams on six continents and at over a hundred locations work on the problems.
In total, there were 40 challenges, such as this one in the category of asteroids: “Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids.” Other tasks included trying to make a “Track that Wetland” app — allowing citizen scientists to record observations and data on the wetlands in their communities — and creating a design for a greenhouse that NASA could use to keep visitors on the moon or Mars stocked with fresh produce.
Each year, the challenges result in the creation of useful apps. Last year, software engineer James Wanga’s team won the Best Hardware Prize for building the prototype of an asteroid mapper. Wanga told Denise Chow of Space.com, “There’s a spirit that infects everyone when we realize all these people around the world are working on the same thing.”
After participating in the NASA Challenge, Wanga and three colleagues started the company Go Lab, which builds tiny satellites for all sorts of uses. Wanga and Co. were at it again this year, coding all weekend long at the Manhattan NASA Space Apps Challenge location in an effort to build a network that could one day allow far-flung astronauts to communicate in space.
“We all understand here that we’re trying to change the world,” Wanga told Chow. “This is the beginning of the space tech boom, and the people here right now are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of space tech start-ups.”
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When Nobody in Technology Looked Like Her, This Woman Did Something About It
Kimberly Bryant’s daughter was never “a girly girl”—instead she was interested in computer games, and aspired to become a game tester. Instead of just setting her daughter up with the latest gaming equipment, Bryant challenged her. Why not become a game developer instead of a tester? When she was studying electrical engineering in college, computers intrigued her, but none of the other people studying computing looked like her, a black woman, so she didn’t pursue that path. Bryant didn’t want the same discouragement to happen to her daughter. Two years ago she established Black Girls Code in San Francisco to introduce technology and software engineering to this generation’s girls. In this video sponsored by American Express, Bryant explains her mission and shows some future technology leaders in action. Black Girls Code has now expanded to eight cities and counting, so get ready for the next generation of software engineers.
Source: YouTube