39 girls attended the panel presentation. Helene Martin requested all the women to bring a picture slideshow to present a glimpse of their personal lives outside of their careers and either a powerpoint or product to demo to the girls. We had a great amount of girls who came even though a few girls came late. Overall, the girls enjoyed the presentation.
Patricia Shaw – Western Washington University MIT Program at Everett – observed the presentations to get ideas on how to design a workshop curriculum to encourage green technologies.
Thank you to our fabulous panelists: Dana Wen, Software Engineer at Medio Systems, Jessica Miller, Lecturer at University of Washington, and Anna Cavender, Software Engineer at Google. Thanks also to Helene Martin of Garfield High School.
Presentation Evaluation Girls’ Comments
What did you like the best about today’s event?
- Seeing exactly what the speakers do. Also the offer for the field trip.
- Listening to the speakers talk about what they did and what they programmed.
- Learning about the different types of projects in computer science careers
- I liked the amount of information that I obtained on a very broad range of computing careers
- Learning about different applications of technology
- The technology for deaf people. It is really cool for them to communicate with others. Eye drawing and some awesome features in cell phones.
- Speakers covered full spectrum of careers, learned about different applications of CS. Speakers very interesting, excited, and fun!
- Learning about technology that helps disabled people.
- The women actually had careers in technological fields, whereas prior years we had lawyers and business people who didn’t have anything to do with technology.
- I liked learning about the projects each of the presenters worked on. More info about their daily tasks at work would’ve also been interesting to hear about.
- Learning about how a product/skill can be used in different ways, learning about specific projects.
- I liked seeing up close actual tech projects and the people who actually worked on it. Definitely exposed me to the literal things I may work on in the future
- I liked the projects they showed us because they were so diverse and cool. I also liked how you guys talked about now just about your jobs, but yourself.
- I liked hearing about diverse paths women took, particularly surrounding music, to get into computers.
- I liked the exposure to what a typical day of a technology engineer consists of. I also liked seeing the different types of projects a software engineer could possibly do.
- Hearing about the deaf kids she helped and the eye draw thing.
- I liked how interesting the guest speakers were. They were energetic and worked on a wide range of projects that could help people and make our lives easier.
- I enjoyed learning about the lives that women have outside of careers in technology. It was nice to know that women can balance work and social lives.
What was the most interesting thing that you heard today?
- The SuperQuinn online shopper and also how, like me, these people were very undecided about what to get a career in.
- What each people do and accomplished.
- Learning about the eye draw program
- The thing about the grocery site. That was cool. Mostly because I like any kind of web design.
- Special video compression for saving specific data
- The grocery online for really busy people. Well, there are lots of good features, and the most important thing is it doesn’t take too long.
- Experience working at startup, differences from industry, etc.
- About drawing with your eyes.
- Jessica Miller’s presentation on her website and designing code for online grocery.
- The wide range of products that can be developed using CS. Many topics/subjects are connected to create a project.
- I was interested in how the grocery website used a program to coordinate lots of people
- None of the presenters had done CS in high school, but they’re all successful in their jobs today. It makes me feel like I can be successful too.
- I learned about how broad the computer science field is. Before, I usually imagined sitting on a computer all day to make computer programs, but now I see it can be applied to cell phones, grocery stores, and drawing.
- None of them knew they wanted to be in CS prior to college.
- I was most interested in learning the different projects that people (engineers) work on.
- The eye draw thing
- I was interested in the phones and the processing that came with broadband width.
- I enjoyed hearing about the application development for mobile phones and the operator interfaces that are being created.
Please tell us what we can do to make this event even better.
- I’m not sure. Apply it more to college and the classes they took.
- Make it even more exciting.
- Have pizza on time
- Umm. Not much. I rather enjoyed myself.
- More hands on activities (get to try out websites/browse)
- I think today is great.
- I wish they talked more about specific challenges for women/if being a woman changed their experience in tech at all.
- We didn’t get to see the mobile phones/how they worked.
- Pizza!
- I didn’t get to see any of the phones. Also the food should get here on time.
- Perhaps make sure the pizza will come on time. Drinks would also be nice.
- rder pizza ahead of time and have it ready by the time the students arrive.
- Make the topics less about the people’s lives and more about the general field.
- To make this event better I think more speakers and a longer time period would be nice.
- I would love to hear more about intensive technical careers such as hardcore computer engineering.
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