CS + Social Change
Recap: 2018 Workshop
August 18-19, 2018
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On August 18-19th, in partnership with She Codes Art and the DaVinci Academy, Art You held CS + Social Change, a free two day interdisciplinary mobile app development workshop for girls in 5th-10th grade in the Greater Seattle Area. Our mission was to provide a friendly and engaging environment for girls to explore the world of CS + software through the intersection of art, design, social change and tech and empower them to become leaders in their generation. Over the course of the camp, the girls worked together in teams to brainstorm social and humanitarian issues/needs in their community they are passionate about, designed and developed mobile applications using MIT App Inventor to address these needs, and presented their app to a panel of women tech professionals in a cumulative showcase.
We are super proud to say that we had 30 brilliant women technologists who participated in our workshop and we were so amazed by the creativity and quality of the apps the girls developed--their apps addressed crucial social issues/needs such as stress, mental illnesses, environmental awareness, and diagnosis of injuries. On the first day, the girls got to do the Marshmallow Challenge, listen to an amazing talk on how to give killer business presentations by Minakshi Velamoor a software professional from the startup, Optio3, learn about need finding/design thinking, and start prototyping and developing their apps with MIT App Inventor. On the second day, the girls did a great job of presenting and demoing their apps to a panel of women tech professionals from Amazon, Microsoft and Optio3 and received awesome feedback on how they could extend the functionality, scalability, and availability of their apps! Our winning team developed an app that could diagnose cuts and wounds and received gift cards to Cold Stone while all of our participants received super cool swag from F5 Networks (high quality and professional backpacks)! We are positive these amazing ladies are going to lead the next generation to effect meaningful social change and can't wait for CS + Social Change 2019! |