Women in AI Summer Camp : The Beginning of A New Chapter
This summer was a blast. On 21–22 June, I had the chance to meet, teach and inspire 10 incredible young girls on AI and robotics. These teenage girls came to TechShop, StationF for Women in AI (WAI)’s first Summer Camp on AI.
The goal of this Summer Camp was to introduce teenage girls to the field of Artificial Intelligence while providing them with hand-on-project to experience and program real AI applications. The ultimate goal is to help teenage girls in their career orientation.
The main reason behind organizing this workshop is to increase young girls interest in STEM studies and AI. Actually, a recent study has shown that the global presence of females in top AI/ML positions is a mere 18% ! That’s a pretty low percentage right?
Microsoft looked into this and conducted interviews with 11,500 girls and young women across Europe about their interest in STEM. They found that by the age of 15, female interest in STEM begins to decrease. The reasons cited included the lack of female role models and hands-on experience available within this area. A further 60 per cent of them admitted that they would be more willing to pursue a STEM-related career if they knew that men and women were equally employed in these professions.
So this Summer Camp is Women in AI (WAI)’s way to increase girl teenagers interest in STEM and particularly AI. This is done by providing information about AI, hands-on-projects and role models for young teenagers to follow.
This Summer Camp was the first edition of our educational program WAI2GO.
The program
On Day 1, June 22, Marie-pierre Rixain, french parliament member and president of the Delegation for Women’s Rights of the National French Assembly, did the openning of the Summer Camp. did the openning of the Summer Camp. Then, my sister in crime (as she likes to say), Moojan Asghari and I presented Women in AI (WAI) and the program of the camp.
The introduction was followed by inspirational talks of inspiring women of leadership. Racha MAHFOUZ from Sylog shared her inspiring story about how she has started and succeeded her own company from scratch together while being a great mother for her twins, showing young girls that it is possible to be a successful entrepreneur and mother. Milie TAING, MBA founder of Lili.ai also shared her journey in founding a company in AI. The main message to the girls behind this: YOU TOO CAN DO IT!
Since it was so important to us to present the students all the career possibilities they can have, Catherine madinier from the coding school 42 did a great presentation about ecole 42 and their unique educational system. Alain Demenet, a student of 42 also presented 42AI, the AI association of 42.
The technical part of the Summer Camp has then kicked of with an introduction by me on Artificial Intelligence and a presentation by Salvatore Anzalone on Robotics. Then the fun started. The girls started building their robot from scratch and experience the joy of hands-on creation.
The building part was not the only fun part. Girls started experiencing autonomously with the robot and some of them were really creative :).
The girls were really engaged and happy playing and experimenting with the robots that two hours passed without noticing. They didn’t want to stop!
But another type of fun was waiting for them…The fun of programming…yeyyy!!
The day finished with an introduction to scratch programming language with practical exercises.
Day 2 started with a demo by SoftBank Robotics of the famous cool robot Nao.
The rest of the day was divided into two parts. In the first part we continued the programming exercises and the second part consisted of a project where girls would autonomously program an intelligent behaviour on the robot.
A great animation to kill boredom by Plaisir Maths just spiced the atmosphere up!
Of course at the end of the day, we had a winner and the prize is a cute robot :)
How did it Go?
Well it went great. Our first Summer Camp for female teenagers was a big success. Seeing these young girls’ enthusiasm and motivation while creating and programming their first robot was so inspiring…
I even had the a special Happy Birthday robotic gift 😃.
Who knew these girls can get Nao to sing me a happy birthday!!!
What did the girls think?
This is my favorite part. The girls just loved it!
I will never forget the touching words written to me by these girls. Some of them will surely pursue a career in AI and robotics.
Oh and yes…We had our first Junior Ambassador out of this Summer Camp, a brilliant girl full of ideas and creativity. We were glad to welcome her to our team and to engage her in our organizing activities, hoping this will help spread the word about the exciting field of AI together while raising the new generation of Women Leaders!
My biggest reward out of this is to know that I might have changed at least one girl’s life and showed her possibilities she did not even know existed before!
All of this was possible thanks to:
All of this was made possible thanks to our amazing partners without who this wouldn’t happen. We are so grateful for Snips for sponsoring the robotic kits, TechShop, Inc especially Mathilde Berchon for hosting us 2 full days and presenting their fantastic prototyping place to the girls, Paris 8 for providing the computers, Plaisir Maths and especially Nicolas Pelay for the great energy boost, Frenchweb for the communication, 42 Born2Code & 42AI for being there with us and presenting the great school and associative activities, SoftBank Robotics for the awesome NAO presentation.
And what’s next ??
The Best is yet to come!
We will organize our second bigger version of Summer Camp and it’s arriving very soon!! So stay Tuned!
