The purpose of this blog is to explore Louisiana's strategy and capacity for advancing STEM education, careers, and workforce for all. Louisiana has its own array of STEM assets, strengths and approaches in place - thus this site is designed to discover these strategies and activities. Not just a PK12 issue - all stakeholders, higher education, workforce development, economic development, business & industry, are welcome to participate. Hopefully the site will pose and answer questions that will ultimately help guide and focus diverse partners in this effort.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

IT-GIRL Rocks Again

Last week, over sixty-five female middle school students attended LA-WIT's (Louisiana Women in Technology) 2nd annual IT-GIRL Day for EBR Middle School Girls at Lee Magnet High. The goal of the annual event is to provide middle school girls the opportunity to learn about careers in technology, connect with high tech professionals, and participate in hands-on, design-based creative computing projects.  In additional to the computing activities, girls participated in various leadership and team building activities. 

Focusing on "creative computing," the IT-GIRL's programming activity placed emphasis on building knowledge and practices that girls need to create the types of dynamic and interactive media that they enjoy in their daily lives, such as videos, animations, games and apps. Engaging in the creation of these types of media not only prepares the students for careers in STEM, particularly in IT fields, but builds confidence, interest and identity in STEM. 

 At the end of the day, the girls had created a story and a game using MIT's scratch programming tool and original apps using Mozilla AppMaker.

 However, this could not have been possible without the twenty-five role models in IT throughout the community that volunteered their time and expertise.  A special thanks also goes out to LA-WIT's valued sponsors:  Louisiana Tech Park, Geocent, Envoc, IBM, and Sparkhound! 

 Photos by:  Lawles Bourque III with LED FastStart Media.   See More...
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  1. Team-building activities must be designed to comply with equality and discrimination policy and law in respect of gender, race, disability, age, etc. Although some of team building exercises might seem way too intense for one’s particular needs, most would be perfect for everyone.

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