ITB/LIT Coding4Girls Summer Camp
This year, LIT were delighted to support and participate in the Coding4Girls Summer Camp, ran by and hosted in the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB), Dublin. My colleagues Yvonne, Andy and myself attended and helped out.
The main goal of this camp was to encourage girls to choose a STEM career as there is significantly less percentage of women in STEM careers. In Yvonne’s college course, in first year, there was about 100 people and only 10 of them were girls and in 3rd year, only 5 girls were left. It’s important to have a more diverse work environment as this allows for different ways of thinking and hence more robust and flexible IT products. STEM careers need more women and we believe that camps like this will help. There were 33 young women participating in this camp, from various levels in local secondary school.
ITB planned and ran all the activities, LIT provided us engineers to help out! We started off with a tower building activity. The girls had to organize themselves into groups of 4; they were then given 10 minutes to discuss how they were going to build their tower, which had to be 36 inches high, using cards, sellotape and scissors. Once the 10 minutes were up they were asked how may cards they wanted — they were not allowed to ask for anymore afterwards. They were then given 20 minutes to build it.
It was interesting to see their ideas come to life and the problems encountered and solved along the way. One team had a very good structure but ran out of cards. Another team’s building was like the Eiffel tower which was a good idea as it would provide a good base however it wasn’t quite wide enough; as it grew it began to topple because it was so skinny, and it couldn’t handle the weight. There were others who fashioned theirs like the Egyptian pyramids, but they weren’t wide enough. One group had a very interesting way of doing theirs which hasn’t been seen before in the three years that the camp has been running for — they inserted the cards into one another. However, as they were getting close to their 36 inches the tower couldn’t stand up by itself. They had no more cards left and they looked deeply worried, but they put their heads together and came up with an idea. They made incisions on the bottom of the tower and split them out. They were the only team to reach the 36 inches mark, the tower could stand by itself and put ten 1 cent coins on top of their tower for 30 seconds.
The reasoning behind this activity is that it shows them the importance of good planning and team work. It also acted as an ice breaker as they were all from various schools and some of them didn’t know anybody there but more importantly they had fun.
Next up was our Liberty IT colleague, Andy. He gave a presentation on the fascinating future of technology. He talked about driverless cars and that their children won’t need to know how to drive! He showed them a picture of a choice that a driverless car may need to make — which course of action to take when faced with crashing or hitting pedestrians.
This brought up a healthy debate and everybody got involved. The point of this example was to highlight the changes and questions that technology can cause, and also to highlight that coding will control so much in the future. Andy also discussed AI and chatbots, showing them Google’s AI assistant’s new ability to ring companies for you and also showed them Amazon Alexa and a custom “Skill” (Alexa’s version of an app) to introduce himself!
We then had our hour of coding. This introduced them to scratch and block coding which taught them the basic fundamentals of programming. They all seemed to be really engrossed in this task. The Star Wars game (on http://code.org) seemed to be the most popular with a lot of the girls discussing the game that they made during lunch.
A few spot prizes were giving out to students during this activity, for students who knew certain technology questions like who was the first person to write a computer algorithm? (Ada Lovelace!)
During lunchtime, Andy demonstrated his AR and VR games that Liberty IT made for use at the recent Coder Dojo Coolest Projects in the RDS, Dublin. He had a basketball VR game, developed by our colleague Kevin Duffy, as well as a shooting AR game. Everybody seemed to be thrilled and fascinated with these games. He gave them information on how they could do make the AR game themselves with code which Liberty has open-sourced. See here for more info: https://medium.com/libertyit/ar-madness-our-open-source-arkit-game-tutorial-part-one-game-design-and-first-arkit-app-1ba35bea136d
The activity that we enjoyed the most was the Arduino Robot Activity. All the girls were split up into groups of two and given a robot each. It involved coding in C, which was giving to the girls and they then just had to modify it to get their desired results like spinning the robot in a circle. Everyone had great fun during this activity.
We were needed the most for this activity as a lot of groups ran into syntax errors or accidentally put their code outside of the function. There was a prize given to the group who could explain what each line of the code was doing.
Afterwards we talked about LIT and what it is like to work there. We also mentioned the LIT scholarship and to look out for it when they are in their 1st year in college if they decided to do computer science. We also gave them advise on looking up free programming courses if they want to get a better insight on what coding is like. We also mentioned the benefits of working in IT and we provided an Amazon Echo and some vouchers (as did ITB) as prizes — the winners were pulled out of a hat. Sort of, we used a random number generator!
Overall, we really enjoyed the event and we would love to do it again next year or maybe even do our own one within the company. The girls really tested our knowledge on coding and they all seemed to really enjoy the event. We feel like we made a good representation of our company and we hope that they will consider a STEM career and us in the future, and that they will not just remember us as an insurance company but an innovative IT company.
Big thanks to Michelle Looby & Orla McMahon from ITB who organised and ran the event and to Daniel McSweeney from ITB for inviting us to take part.
Snehal Jadhav and Yvonne Murphy, Liberty IT.
