Today's Itinerary:
7:30am- Orientation and Breakfast 8:30am- Bus leaves hotel for GoDaddy 9:00am - 10:30am GoDaddy tour and workshop- GoDaddy HQ 11:00am Bus leaves GoDaddy HQ for Facebook HQ 11:30am - 2:00pm Facebook campus tour, panel, and demos - Facebook HQ
2:00pm Bus leaves Facebook HQ for Stanford 2:30pm - 3:30pm Talk by Keith Schwarz, lecturer in Computer Science - Stanford 3:45pm Bus leaves Stanford for hotel 4:00pm - 5:30pm Early Dinner (Pizza), get ready for Gala - The Domain Hotel 5:30pm Bus leaves hotel for Gala 6:30pm - 10:00pm she++ Gala - The GlassHouse 10:15pm Bus leaves Gala for hotel 10:30pm - 12:00am Free time - The Domain Hotel 12:00am Check in with chaperone - The Domain Hotel
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As I write this, it is 11pm and I am currently in a comfortable hotel bed in San Francisco the night before Day One of the fellowship!
Today, I have met She++ fellows from across America and She++ ambassadors from across the world! This picture is on the Uber from the airport to the hotel with 3 other fellows I had just met. I can't wait for what tomorrow holds. Will check back in soon! Tomorrow I'm flying out to San Francisco for the #include fellowship with She++! Right now- I am doing some last minute packing and getting my stuff together before my early morning flight.
I am so beyond excited to meet the 29 other fellows and fly alone for the first time! My goal is to document the entire trip for the capstone purposes. Catch you on the flip side!
My friend Usha (she helped out at my last Cupcakes 'n Code event) and I volunteered at STEMmerday at a nearby Elementary school.
You're probably thinking: "STEMmerday... what???"- but let me explain. A nearby elementary school partnered with Lockheed Martin, the advanced technology and engineering company, to integrate a “STEM curriculum” for the school. As part of this initiative, they created an annual "STEMmerday" event, during which students will have the opportunity to participate in a variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) activities. Students explore more than 30 hands-on, fun activities. Paper airplane contests, egg drop competitions, rocket launches, robotics and more! We had a lot of fun and when the event was over, we stayed back to play some of the programming games ourselves because they looked so fun! Today I had an amazing opportunity to attend the DCFemTech Inspire event!
The DCFemTech Inspire event celebrates the successes of women in the DC tech community and I was invited to speak about Cupcakes 'n Code. It was amazing to hear about the awesome accomplishments of strong, hardworking women in the field and what they were proud of. This couldn't have been possible without my mentor, Mr. David Bock, founder of Loudoun Codes! My flight is all booked and ready to go!
I am kind of nervous to be flying all the way out to San Francisco by myself (taking connecting flights with layovers and such), but I guess this is what #adulting is. Since this trip occurs right before Spring Break starts, I will be catching a flight from San Francisco and meeting my parents in Las Vegas on the way back for our family vacation. This should be fun- I'm thinking of vlogging the full trip! Let me know what you think about that. In one of my earlier blog posts, I told you all that I would be applying as a She++ #include fellow to attend a 3 day all-expense paid trip to San Francisco to meet tech executives and present my initiative, Cupcakes 'n Code in Silicon Valley.
Well- I got selected! Over 500 people applied to this fellowship, and only 30 fellows were selected. I am so excited to attend and meet other girls, learning about their awesome initiatives to share coding with underrepresented groups in their communities. Today was my first Cupcake 'n Code workshop!
Almost all 30 of the registered girls showed up, which was awesome! They all enjoyed the cupcakes and coding with each other- making friends with those with similar interests. For the workshop, we used Google's MadeWithCode resource, which is similar to Scratch, however, it is made specifically for girls. It shows that coding can be interdisciplinary, it can be combined with art, music, fashion, animation, etc. One of the girls came up to me after the event and said "I've done Hour of Code at school, but this was way more interesting and fun!" With that, I felt so accomplished, as I had showed girls that coding can be fun and can parallel their personal interests. My goal for this event was to teach girls something they wouldn't learn at school, and since my community focuses more on the physical sciences and neglects computer science- this is something the girls would otherwise, not be exposed to. Special thank you to my parents who helped me set up the room and accompanied me to approach sponsors, etc. Also, thank you to my close friend, Usha [pictured above], who assisted me with debugging code, photography and clean up! Just picked up my cupcakes today! They are so cute and I am so happy with how they turned out.
I hope the girls enjoy them tomorrow! I decided to get cupcakes catered from Giant! They discounted from an original price of $70 for 50 cupcakes and brought it down to $38. I gave them the design and they said it was doable to make them by Saturday, just in time for Sunday's big kickoff event.
Also, a very kind soul from my community's Facebook page wanted to donate, so I stopped by her place today to pick up the money. She gave a generous donation of $40- which covered the whole cost of the cupcakes! I am so grateful for my amazing community and their open-mindedness to my initiative, encouraging girls to explore programming! |
TanyaJust a techie teen spreading around the coding superpower. Archives
June 2017
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