Fifth Grade Girls Find Coolness in Geekiness at Yahoo!

Posted November 13th, 2009 at 11:00 am by Lucas Mast, Blog Editor

 5 Comments / Filed in: Women in Tech

Yahoo! Women in Tech, an internal stakeholder group for women across Yahoo!’s technology organization, recently partnered with Techbridge to host another K-12 event. Twenty-nine fifth-grade girls from Lincoln Elementary (Oakland, Calif.) spent the day at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus to get a glimpse of what “high-tech” people do all day.

Encouraging girls to consider careers in tech

Imagine that there was a technology program designed just for girls. Techbridge did, and developed a program to introduce girls to various applications of technology and to encourage them to consider careers in technical and scientific fields. The program offers a deep set of services including: after school and summer programs in girls-only environments, career exploration through field trips, interactions with role models, and academic and career guidance. Techbridge is an outreach program of the Chabot Space & Science Center.

Finding your inner geek through play

The day at Yahoo! was packed with activities, beginning with an encouraging welcome by Yahoo! Women-in-Tech volunteer role models. After an icebreaker on Yahoo! trivia, the girls divided into smaller groups for three fun and challenging technical activities.

The Internet Safety game taught the girls important information about how to safely navigate the Web. The Finding your Fish activity helped girls discover how search engines retrieve information. By playing a fishing game similar to Battleship, the girls were able to explore three different types of searching.

By the end of the Algorithm Work Out activity, our guests were able to write their own algorithms for doing a host of callisthenic exercises including jumping jacks, sit ups, leg raises and crab walks.

When I grow up, I want to work at Yahoo!

After a lunch break, the teams launched into a scavenger hunt of special Yahoo! landmarks.

Girls criss-crossed Yahoo!’s vast Sunnyvale campus to check email at the purple cow, learn about assistive technology at the Yahoo! accessibility lab, find Carol Bartz’s cube, discover Mario Land, and more. In addition to getting their run of the Yahoo! campus, the girls were able to meet a broad range of special Yahoos including: Yahoo! Chief Information Office (and K-12 event photographer) Mike Kirwan, Yahoo! Developer Network Managing Editor Havi Hoffman, President of Yahoo! Women-in-Tech Karolina Buchner, and Head of Yahoo! Labs Prabhakar Raghavan,

At the close of the day, the girls shared their favorite memories and let out a collective Yahoooooooo! yodel. Their energy, spirit, and enthusiasm made this event a blast for all. We sent the Lincoln girls home with personalized gold stars, reusable purple goodie bags, and a lifetime of Yahoo! love.

Julie Shin Choi & Shannyn Timrott
Yahoo! Women-in-Tech, K-12 Program

Tagged: k-12, techbridge, Women in Tech, yahoo

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5 Comments Add your own

Kerry | November 16th, 2009 at 9:43 pm

I think it’s wonderful you are encouraging young women to pursue careers in technology. When I was growing up it wasn’t really an option, but now I’ve retrained and am completely immersed in technology. Well done!

jenn | November 17th, 2009 at 7:45 am

really good to see a workshop which gives young people real skills they will be able to use in their futures

Melanie Rhianna (aka Cyberspice) | November 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am

I think this is awesome.

Recently at a BarCamp I was talking with some fellow women coders and geeks and we were discussing how to encourage girls and women to get in to IT and how to reverse the current trend of less and less women entering the profession. We decided that the only way was to encourage the grade school girls since by the time they’d gotten to their teens they’d already been discouraged.

Its great to see one of the IT giants doing exactly that. Keep up the good work.

Melanie

Andrew | December 10th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

What was on the t-shirts that the staff were wearing? It looks like it might be “Code like a girl”, but I can’t tell for sure. Anyway it’s very cool to see events like this, I’m encouraging my twin daughters to be as geeky as I am :-).

Pe | January 18th, 2010 at 9:40 am

This is such a good event, what a positive message to send to young people!