LITAS April Newsletter

LITAS Stanford Workshop

On April 28th, Stanford Women in CS (WiCS) and LITAS for Girls co-hosted a one-day coding workshop at Stanford for middle and high school girls from all over the Bay Area.

Two-thirds of the attendees had no prior experience in Computer Science. However, that did not stop the group of enthusiastic girls as they designed websites for young voter registration as well as another for publicly contacting local government officials. Through the latter, the officials can address issues that are considered important by the voters.

The next event was a panel discussion from Kat Duarte and Carmen Villanobos from Google where they highlighted the involvement of Latinas in Technology and STEM fields. Kat Duarte has in fact attended the first Latina Round table in 2015 where TECHNOLOchicas was created. She has even created a STEAM camp, where over 300 middle school students are instructed and school district faculty trained. Carmen Villanabos has worked with Google’s Tech Student dev team to outline an outreach strategy for Hispanic Serving Institutions and has served as a mentor to inner city youth.

Next was a Talk on Social Entrepreneurship by Tom Kosnik from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and FoundersX Ventures. Tom has been a Lecturer at Stanford Engineering, Department of Management Science and Engineering since 1990. He is also a coauthor of Gear Up: Test Your Business Model Potential and Plan your Path to Success, John Wiley and Sons. He is an advisory board member of LITAS. The workshop ended with a keynote address by Charlotte Weaver from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who discussed the usage of technology for medical applications and genomics. She is currently working on applications to visualize and analyze single cell RNA-seq data. She is also the co-founder of the Women’s Coding Circle at CZI.

LITAS Certification Program

This month, we also launched our LITAS Certification program, where we will be collaborating with clubs to inspire girls and underrepresented minorities in technology. We hope to help students learn and understand STEM by applying their knowledge to solve real world problems.

Under this program, clubs will get to be a part of the LITAS leaders community, where they will get access to our curriculum on HTML/CSS and Python. They will be a part of our mentorship program as well where they will be connected with women engineers, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and many more. In addition, the club will also receive regular publicity on our social media as part of our community. Through this program, we hope to promote diversity as well as provide a solid framework for these clubs to take their work forward. Apply today at www.litas4girls.org/cert! The deadline for the first round of applications is May 31st.

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