Bridging the Digital Divide: A Grassroots Approach for #CSForAll (1/3)
This summer, as the founder and CEO of LITAS For Girls, a 501©(3) nonprofit guiding young women in CS and STEM, I had the opportunity to lead two weeklong summer incubators in CS and Entrepreneurship for girls from 6–12th grade. Our first incubator had thirty girls and took place in Phoenix, Arizona, and the second had more than fifty girls and was hosted in Haryana, India.
Organizing two mirroring programs on opposite ends of the globe was both disorienting and fascinating, and in this three-part series, I’d like to share with you a few lessons I’ve learned this summer, and more than a few amusing stories. This first installment covers my experiences with teaching creativity, and what it taught me about global problem solving.
Creativity Flourishes Everywhere
One of the most important philosophies of LITAS is that knowledge should be applied to better the world — we don’t just teach girls to code, we teach them to code with a purpose. So after learning the basics of web and mobile app development, the girls work in teams to brainstorm and prototype products that use CS to solve some social problem. The theme of this year was Digital Health, so most of the solutions were in that arena.
If I’d asked you what problems the girls would want to solve in the US vs India, I’d expect answers like “cancer”, “obesity”, and “depression” for the US. And, indeed, these were some of the most common problems in the Phoenix incubator. However, I was surprised to find that the problem that came up most in India was teen suicide. It turns out that this is because there are so few seats in Indian colleges and so much competition that many hardworking students don’t get a spot, which leads to depression and even suicide. Other issues that I never would have predicted were drug addiction, and elderly abuse of grandparents. From this experience, I realized that solutions to India’s problems can only come from those who are intimately familiar with the country. If we want developing countries to develop, we must inspire creativity and a problem-solving spirit in the children of those countries.
For all the problems the kids came up with, there was no dearth of creative solutions. Here are some of my favorites:
- An app with speech therapy games for kids with speech disorders
- A software to use the webcam to detect eye strain in users and mandate breaks (India)
- An app to track the health of pets with Animal Cancer (US)
Solutions are Never What You Expect
I’d like to note that female infanticide/foeticide was indeed one of the problems the kids in India chose to solve — although certainly not in the way that I expected. The group of girls wanted to make an app so people could report the names of doctors who did abortions based on gender. “Oh,” I asked, “so you can report them to the police?” “NO.” They replied. “So we can EXPOSE THEM to the PRESS!!”
Solutions are never what you expect.
But who am I to curb creativity? :)
In the next part of my series, I discuss what we can learn from teaching Computer Science in two different cultures — and the time when I (inadvertently) got called poisonous. Hope you’ll join me.
Cheers!
Anvita
For more about LITAS For Girls, please check out our website.
