This summer, STEMPowering Girls hosted online summer workshops to teach programming to interested children. In the past, these workshops were held in person, but due to health concerns, this year’s workshops were held online. The workshops were held once a week for five weeks, and each week the students were introduced to new programming concepts. Following each week’s lesson, we provided the kids with opportunities to practice using the skills they had learned. They were able to learn the basics of Java and Python, and applied everything they learned to a summative project. Although this year’s circumstances were unconventional, we wanted to continue empowering kids, especially girls, to explore STEM. 

This summer, STEMPowering Girls opened up summer workshops for kids to learn about programming. Young girls were able to learn the basics of EV3, EV3 Python, Scratch, and Java through basic curriculums.  The workshops were held every Saturday for seven weeks, and each week the girls worked on a new lesson or project. During the last workshop, the kids were given a final challenge which required them to apply all of the skills they had learned over the past seven workshops. Some students completed the challenges that the volunteers suggested, while others came up with their own individual projects. Through these workshops, we hoped to introduce these young girls to programming, a field that they may not have been familiar with, and encourage them to continue exploring it even after the workshops ended. All of the lessons we used for these workshops are linked under the “lessons” tab. 

Thank you to our sponsor Somos for their generous donation to STEMPowering Girls, with which we were able to purchase 3 EV3 Lego Mindstorms robotics kits. Using these kits we coached 4 teams to compete in the World Robot Olympiad VA/MD/DC Regional Tournament held on May 11, 2019.

On September 14-15, 2 members from the STEMPowering Girls team, Neha Bhat and Nithya Chintalapati, participated in the World Robot Olympiad National Championship at Fairmont State University in West Virginia. They won first place in the Regular Senior Category and will be representing Team USA at the World Championship in Thailand this November. Congratulations Neha and Nithya!!

They were featured on Fox5dc news channel.

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/fairfax-county-all-girls-robotics-team-to-compete-in-world-finals-in-thailand

https://patch.com/virginia/mclean/all-girls-robotics-team-fairfax-county-goes-world-finals