From Nigeria to Kenya, TechInPink bridges digital divide - Vanguard News

vanguardngr.com - AT face value, Yetunde Sanni and Gertrude Nyenyeshi have nothing in common. Sanni is from Nigeria, Nyeyenshi from Kenya. They haven’t even met in person. At a deeper level however, their love for technology unites them. Both ladies founded, and now run TechInPink, an organisation that teaches women and girls coding and software development regardless of their background. According to Sanni, who is also a full time stack developer at Andela: “We started with blogging which involves teaching other people the craft of software development, we decided to do this because we found out we have very few tech based blogs that are run by women and we took the challenge upon ourselves to transform the false that women can’t write great code tutorials.”

Although the organisation is barely a year old, success stories abound from the ‘pink techies’ efforts. There are two students that readily come to mind when we’re asked about our success stories,” said Nyenyeshi, a full stack Javascript developer.

“One is Salma, an Architecture student in Kenya, and the other is Ruth a paramedical student in Nigeria who we mentored last year. They both had no prior experience but their transformation has been tremendous. We’d also list the two events that we held in both locations a success story as the ladies were introduced and taught about programming and it makes us smile to see some of them actively pursuing opportunities to learn more.”

Supermodel Karlie Kloss chats with us about the launch of Kode With Klossy, a coding camp for girls

techcrunch.com - Karlie Kloss made headlines last year when she announced she was not only a high-ranking model but could also code in Ruby.

Kloss, who says she’s always been interested in math and science, started learning to program a couple of years ago.

The supermodel partnered with the Flatiron School in New York City last year to launch #KodewithKarlie, a scholarship program for teen girls.

The supermodel is now starting Kode With Klossy, a coding summer camp for girls ages 13-18. The two-week camp will provide scholarships to 80 young women from New York, Los Angeles and Karlie’s hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

Kloss chatted with me recently about why she decided to pick up the coding trade, how that plays out in her supermodel world and why she decided to launch a camp for young women interested in programming.

TC: You’re a supermodel with an ultra-successful career in the fashion industry. Why learn to code? What’s the story behind wanting to do that?

KK: I grew up in St. Louis and didn’t really know anything about fashion until I walked in a charity fashion show at my local mall and was signed to a modeling agency. Before my modeling career took off, I really loved my math and science classes in school. My dad was an ER doctor and as a girl, I dreamed of following in his footsteps. Taking coding classes brings me back to the excitement I felt as a kid in first-period biology. I’m a curious person and coding allows me to think about how our world is built.

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Photos: Girls rule at Ocean Science conference

We're always happy to see girls encouraged to get their hands on some science—literally. So we loved discovering the Girls in Ocean Science Conference. As part of its ongoing effort to get girls excited about ocean science and involved with hands-on reserach, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography welcomed more than 100 middle school girls to an ocean science conference. Women scientists from UCLA, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Algalita Marine Research and Education and more teach workshops and discuss careers in areas like oceanography, marine ecology, biochemistry and deep sea science. Learn more about the workshop, and the Institute's ongoing effort, by reading the full article.

ocregister.com - DANA POINT – Serena Chuc couldn’t get enough of looking at the bright green and blue species of coral on the ocean floor.

Thanks to special software from a researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the 13-year-old Capistrano Beach girl could see the different types of coral and find out why they look the way they do. She also learned about key components of reef habitats and why coral can be found in so many spots in the world’s oceans.

“I thought it was really interesting because coral is so beautiful and it can adapt to live in all different waters,” Chuc said.

Chuc, a student at Shorecliffs Middle School in San Clemente, was among more than 100 middle school girls from Orange, San Diego and Los Angeles counties who took advantage of a girls-only ocean science conference Saturday at the Ocean Institute.

The event was part the institute’s 11-year effort to get girls in middle and high school interested in all types of ocean sciences with hands-on training and workshops. Presentations were held aboard the institute’s research vessel, the Sea Explorer, and at the institute’s labs.

Eight female scientists from institutions including UCLA, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Algalita Marine Research and Education were on hand to help the girls explore careers in such areas as oceanography, marine ecology, biochemistry and deep sea science.

Read more here.

8 ways you can empower girls to learn coding

Make sure to check out this article, excerpted below, by Matt Petronzio of Mashable about how to invest in girls by empowering them to learn coding—the language of the future—so they will be part of a revolution in STEM careers. Petronzio discusses the progress we've made so far, hurdles we must still overcome, what the average person can do and much more. We've included just the first below. See the full article for the other seven points as well as statistics, inspiration and ideas about what you can do to help encourage and empower some of our brightest girls.

1. Know the specific barriers we need to overcome.

Before anything, you need to understand the systemic obstacles preventing girls from getting into coding. Both a culture that persistently ignores and discourages girls' abilities in computer science, and the lack of access to tools and education, play influential roles.

Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, says it's deeply ingrained in our culture to let it be OK for girls to say they don't like math and science.

"We almost sensationalize it in culture for girls to promote that," she tells Mashable. "You can walk into a Forever 21 and buy a T-shirt that says 'I'm allergic to algebra' ... You're always showcasing these really smart girls hiding their intelligence when it comes to math and science."

If girls can't see themselves in these professions, Saujani adds, they're not going to choose to pursue them. And that also extends to inside classrooms, where coding is rarely offered to students in general, much less focusing on girls — an obstacle Code.org founder and CEO Hadi Partovi says is equally as significant as culture.

"If you enter a classroom and you see 18 boys and two girls, you automatically think, 'I'm in the wrong place and I'm not welcome,'" Partovi says. "And that makes it harder."

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eJYW4ew5eg[/embed]

Read the rest of the article here. Also check out CodeGirl, a documentary from award-winning filmmaker Lesley Chilcott that follows teams from the thousands of girls around the world taking part in the Global Technovation Challenge by building apps that help their communities.