One of the bigger struggles that the IT industry faces is there aren’t enough women engineers; the field is so very obviously dominated by men and in a lot of ways still in the dark ages. If I meet any of you in person (coffee anyone?), I have a headful of hilarious first-day-on-project-as-a-woman stories.
Given that I actively promote Black Girls Code and have helped run workshops for the girls in CyberMentor, it’s only apropos that I send my own daughter to computer camp to show her that girls can code too! She’s also recently shown interest in what I do at work (and why people fly “mama” around the world to solve computer problems).
The camp that caught my eye was Robotics at Stanford; it’s run by iD Tech Camps, which pulls in various students from around the US to teach kids an interesting mix of computer topics. It looked fun and the robots are built out of Lego… and La Niña loves Lego.
Rather than go through a long explanation of what she did at camp, the class made their own video to share (you just have to friend me on Vimeo to see videos). Over the course of 1-week, La Niña built two robots. Her first used light sensors to find obstacles and navigate around these obstacles (the maze in the first video). Her second robot was a button controlled device that she was programming to navigate stairs (but didn’t get a chance to finish).
I couldn’t help but think that over the course of one week, she’s learned how to program the software that runs a Roomba.
(Most of the photos in the gallery are of La Niña‘s active campaign to get one of the instructors (DT) pied and dunked in water. The campaign worked. My child may actually be more of a politician/activist than a technologist.)
