Inspiring Through Raspberry Pi
After immersing myself in my school's tech community this year I noticed a trend: at almost every meeting or event, I was either the only or one of two girls present. These entrenched societal stereotypes not only created a gender imbalance in the involvement of girls in the STEM community, but they also made it more difficult for girls to develop an interest in STEM in the first place.
As an Ambassador for g4g, I intend to empower girls by running introductory coding classes, weekly workshops, as well as hosting female guest speakers. In order to increase the number of young girls in STEM, it is important to expose girls to STEM projects at an early age, because people often think that it’s “too late” to start in high school.
I believe I can make the biggest impact by working directly with middle school kids and help guide them towards participating in STEM based activities. In doing so we can empower young girls and encourage them to pursue leadership roles by the time they become high school students. I teamed up with Jaclyn and here is our project!
Project description
Between October and December, we are inviting middle school girls at Concordia International School Shanghai and girls across the globe to join us for a fun Raspberry Pi setup/project tutorials for beginners.
Follow along as we will build three fun projects: a Whoopi cushion, a quick reaction game, and a robot buggy! At the same time, students will be able to learn some basic python techniques as well as engineering skills practical in the future. We will start off by introducing the basics of a Raspberry Pi and some essential programming techniques that we will be using later on in the course. After students are familiarized with the Raspberry Pi, we will start working on our three projects.
Students do not need any programming or engineering experience to have fun in this course and they will definitely leave with plenty of useful skills. We cover it all from the basics of Python to the different functions of the Raspberry Pi. These mini Raspberry Pi projects are not only easy to make, but also lots of fun putting together. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can explore more advanced projects and build so much more with the Raspberry Pi.
While hosting these classes at our school, Jaclyn and I will also be creating tutorial videos of these three projects that will be uploaded onto the g4g website for anyone who wants to build and have fun at home!
Through this project we hope to inspire more young girls to participate in STEM related activities, so they can become leaders in their communities in the future. We want girls to know that STEM isn’t just a “boys’ thing”, and that STEM opportunities are always open to them.
Project updates
October 2021…Our official Raspberry Pi 101 lessons start this Friday, October 15th! The class will take place in our new MS STEM room with four built in monitors. We've had a total of nine 7th and 8th grade girls sign up and we're so excited to guide and inspire them throughout their STEM journey.
Over the last month, Jaclyn and I have started experimenting with motors, coming up with fun projects, and creating lesson plans curated for middle school girls. In this process, our community has given us amazing support and feedback for the work we have been doing. Specifically, our AP physics teacher, who we found out by coincidence is also a girls in STEM advocate. He has been a major supporter to us and this project by helping us purchase and prepare the Raspberry Pi's as well as guide us through challenges.
Jaclyn and I are incredibly excited about the journey ahead of us, and we hope the students enjoy it as much as we do!
Thanks,
Nicole
August 2021… Today we just unboxed our first Raspberry Pi, and we've been experimenting with its different functionalities. Though we've faced several challenges, it's so fun to experiment with and explore new things. We've learned so much already, and hope you can join us on our journey!
