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Tag: education

Design for DigiGirlz

Published August 17, 2012

On Wednesday, I had the unique experience of teaching 110 high school girls an intro to interaction design workshop. Officially entitled “Making the World Easier With Interaction Design”, this was a course I built from scratch after offering to teach the subject at Microsoft’s annual Digigirlz Tech Camp. It’s a free weeklong program open to high school girls. They spend the week at Microsoft, hearing speakers, seeing demos, taking tours, and doing hands-on workshops like mine. Back when I debuted my Computer Engineer Barbie talk at Interaction ’11, I mentioned that my eventual goal was to craft a curriculum for…

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Take Your Kids to Work The Carnival Day

Published July 10, 2012

Last Friday was Take Your Kids to Work Day, formerly Take Your Daughters to Work Day. I participated as a mentor, talking to kids and answering questions about how to combine art and technology in jobs at places like Microsoft. Now, it’s no secret that I’m pretty passionate about this kind of work, seeing as I’ve spent multiple years on the Board of IGNITE (Inspiring Girls Now In Technology Evolution). It’s important to give kids enough information about what’s out there for them, in the hopes of empowering them to get passionate and make the right choices. But at the…

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Soliloquy of a Graduate Student

Published August 5, 2011

I opened Pandora’s box today. While idling in traffic, curiosity struck me out of the blue. I’ve been keeping online journals since 1997, give or take, stretched across 4 or so sites. Would any still be active? The answer: my undergrad journal is no longer with us, but my grad school journal DOES exist, on the public internet (if you know where to find it, and no I’m not telling). You wouldn’t want to read it anyway – I had forgotten how painfully emo I was when dealing with the stress of grad school and my clinical depression. However, THIS…

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Evolving the Message

Published May 13, 2011

This past year has marked the beginning of what I suspect will be a long journey for me (and hopefully others!) to improve the state of STEM education in the country with a sort of grassroots approach. There are many different demographics to focus on, and I’ve chosen to focus on what I know and what I can speak to – women in STEM careers. There’s plenty of room for others who choose to focus on different demographics, but between my personal passion on the subject and the significant decline in female interest in STEM careers like computer science, the call…

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Demystifying Job Shadows

Published April 15, 2011

They’re a rather mysterious concept out of context – after all, I never did a job shadow when I was growing up or even when I was in college. The closest I ever got was visiting my dad’s engineering firm, running around, playing on the computers and being AMAZED at all the choices of beverages he stocked. (How prophetic, since almost every place I’ve ever worked is a member of the free-soda-and-assorted-beverages club.) And I think that’s part of what can make it difficult to find volunteers for job shadows – the uncertainty of “What on earth would I do with…

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