Bertha Shaw Public School conquers their first Hackergal Hackathon!
Four months after hosting the largest all girls hackathon across Canada, Hackergal was at it again! On May 2nd 2018, over a 100 schools participated in our Spring Hackathon which took place in 7 provinces and 1 territory. We had over 2,500 girls learn python in preparation for Hackathon Day. We’ve created the Hackergal Hackathon to celebrate and encourage girls to explore a subject that may be new or intimidating in the world of computer science and ultimately raising awareness on the gender gap that exists. The Hackergal Program is a movement to bring equity to the Canadian technology landscape. The energy and excitement was truly radiating throughout Canada as educators and girls took on code!
We recently hosted a social media contest where we would feature the winning school and educator in our Post Hackathon blog! Our winning school is… *drumroll please*… BERTHA SHAW PUBLIC SCHOOL! Congratulations to Myra Ryan (Grade 1 Teacher), Laurie Boychuk (Grade 5 Teacher), and Michelle McKechnie (Grade 2 Teacher) for entering our social media contest and sharing your experience with the Hackergal Hackathon!
Bertha Shaw Public School is a French elementary school in South Porcupine, Ontario with roughly 260 students enrolled from JK to Grade 6. Bertha Shaw has 3 designated teachers working on a TLLP (Teacher Leadership Learning Project) with the Ministry of Education. Their project is called “Girls + STEM = The sky’s the limit!”. Myra, Laurie, and Michelle started a girls STEM club which takes place during recess time and has received a lot of interest from their students. As they wanted to add more activities to their programming, they came across the Hackergal Hackathon Program through social media and thought it would be an exciting adventure for their junior girls. As our program requires no experience or background in code, they decided to give the hackathon a try! This was a great opportunity to introduce the Hackergal python lessons in an exciting way which would prepare the girls for the hackathon.
The hackathon takes place over the course of one full school day where the girls work in teams of 2–3 to code a story using the coding concepts they learned during the on-boarding lessons. The stories had to be created based on a surprise theme which was revealed the morning of the hackathon. This year’s theme was “Endangered Species”. Each team researched an endangered species of their choice and coded stories telling facts about their animal. The girls would be awarded badges based on coding, gameplay and design.
“When doing the Hackathon, many of our girls felt empowered and they were very excited to take on this challenge.” — Myra Ryan, Grade 1 Teacher
Myra mentioned she really enjoyed the ease of the lessons and thought the girls were very much engaged throughout the entire process. After the hackathon, the girls got to view the full gallery of stories created by other Hackergals across the country! “This inspired some of the girls to continue coding and to create their own interactive stories after the Hackathon.” said Laurie Boychuck. This is what Hackergal is all about — creating a sense of community for the girls and empowering the girls to continue learning.
In addition to the day, with the support of Cisco Canada, we were able to connect all 100+ schools via Cisco’s WebEx technology during the hackathon! We were so excited to have this video technology to connect all our schools together with a special address from Michelle Ash, Chief Innovation Officer at Barrick Gold, to the girls. It was so incredible seeing all our educators and girls in action and sharing in their excitement. This was truly the highlight of our day.
Thank you to Myra, Laurie, and Michelle for sharing their Hackergal experience. We can’t wait to work with Bertha Shaw Public School again!
