PRESS RELEASE

5 December 2014

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER of the 2014 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero. Proudly sponsored by the University of Queensland, the Tech Girls Movement is proud to announce Sara Price, a year 7 student from Melbourne Girls Grammar School in Victoria as the winner of the national competition.

Sara’s app Positive Penguins has already sold 15000 copies. Dr Beekhuyzen, the Founder of the non-profit company and the Tech Girls Are Superheroes campaign said she couldn’t be more excited to bestow Sara and the other winners and finalists with the title of 2015 Ambassadors.

“Sara has shown creativity, determination and empathy in developing the idea for her technology solution to a situation many children face. She has articulated a way for children to deal with a stressful situation, and she has branded and marketed the idea well too”.

The app that Sara designed is a tool to help children understand how their emotions come from their thinking and teach them to challenge (or problem solve) the negative stories they tell themselves. Sara feels this is especially important when feelings relate to bullying, being different, anxiety, and worry. Sara has named herself Enthusiastica when she transforms into a superhero.

The second prize winner Emilie Morscheck (aka Storyteller) is in year 12 at Dickson College in Canberra, who proposed an innovative app called Beauty Is Only A Photoshop Layer Deep which helps girls feel better about their body image. Third prize goes to the self-named Terrific Trio of three girls in year 4 at the Whitsunday Anglican School in Queensland for their interactive cyber bullying solution that is built as Mindcraft Adventure Map. The team is made up of Taynah McMurtrie, Kate Rogers, and Alyssa Bremner.

A highly commended award is also being awarded to Jaycia Adams (aka Purple Princess), a year six student from Binjour Plateau State School in Queensland. Even though Jaycia’s school only has 21 students, that didn’t stop her from participating in her regional techie club run by teacher Robyn Peterson. 

“Jaycia’s computer access was not so good. She even had to drive to another town to get online for our Tech Girls Sessions!!” says Robyn.

Senator Michaelia Cash has been a strong supporter of the competition, launching it at ANU in May and recording a heartwarming personalised message for the finalists.

Marie Johnson, the Patron for the competition who runs the Centre for Digital Business, also gave an inspiring message to the finalists in a video, as did Helen McHugh from the ACS and many of the real life tech girl superheroes in the Tech Girls Are Superheroes book.

More details about all of the finalists can be found via: http://www.techgirlsmovement.org/2014-finalists.

All of the finalists will receive a prize pack and be mentored by real life tech women in featured in the free book for school girls, Tech Girls Are Superheroes. To order a book or for more information, go to www.techgirlsaresuperheroes.org.

This week I was honoured to be invited to a roundtable discussion in Sydney on STEM education with the Assistant Minister for Education Sussan Ley MP. 

Sitting around a table with VIPs from around the country, there were some interesting discussions about the current state of STEM education in schools, the gaps in our current workforces, with strategies for improving both of these areas put forward from many different perspectives.

I had the opportunity to talk about girls and women in STEM, and what the current challenges are as reported by the research. These are the main points I made:

• Some consider technology careers as “made up, not real” – Baroness Susan Greenfield in her book Mind Change brings together all of the research on how digital technologies are impacting on our brains.
• We lose girls’ interest in technology in school between year 4 and year 8. You can find my colleague Dr Kaylene Clayton’s work here and her full dissertation here
• There is a lack of visible female technology role models and there is a lack of understanding of what tech people do 
  • WinIT project – the Australian context here
  • WinIT project – paper on Germany here 
  • Digital Divas project – final report here
• Girls in tech are more likely to come from single sex-schools – paper here
• We find most females in technology related degrees at universities in Australia more likely to be in double degrees and Masters degrees – this suggests to us that they like the application of technology rather than technology for technology’s sake. 
• Interventions do work and can be a positive strategy for engaging girls.
• This is a complex problem that cannot be easily solved. NCWIT propose a useful model in their Girls in ICT report which shows the influencers on a girls decision making, and that they come from a range of sources such as peers, the media, school/teachers/curriculum, parents, policy etc. Their useful report which draws on contemporary research is here

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this information with the Prime Minister to hopefully influence some policy change that can change the future of the tech industry by helping us build expertise in our workforce.

 

 

I’m very excited to announce the 13 finalist teams with 16 #techgirls aged between 9 and 17!

Congratulations to all #techgirls who entered, it was a very tough decision. We will announce the winner on the 5th of December. It is going to be a touch decision!

Stay tuned.

Read about the finalists here…

So the day is finally here, Go Girl, Go For I.T. has been running bi-annually since 2006…we have 1300 registrations this year which is a record! & there is pink everywhere. There is a real buzz in the air! I’ve been here for the past few events, and I’m excited!!!

With Karen Stocks MD of Twitter kicking off the day and encouraging us all to tweet via #ITisit, we were off to a great start! 🙂 Great work Fi Slaven, Chair of the Steering Committee of Go Girl 2014! We’re excited for what the day will bring!

Then I got to give my presentation to this awesome #techgirls audience! You girls rock 🙂 Oh and the obligatory #selfie with these cool girls…

Then it was time to set up the tradeshow display and get some superhero help! Morphear (aka Eva) and Scriptrix (aka Monica) helped me (Jewella) set up ready for the girls asking questions..

There was just too much awesomeness to capture!!! This is my fave pic! It captures the day well 🙂

Here are some of my favourite #techgirls superheroes!

You can see the buzz for yourself! 🙂

More of my fave tech girl superheroes! 

We got a great write up here in ITWire...

Thanks superheroes. Till next time….

This week I was invited to see the great work they are doing at Melbourne Girls Grammar School. I was very impressed with the level of commitment to #STEM and the forward thinking team delivering ICT. Eva aka Morphear, our very own superhero, presented last week at the launch of the Techie Club! I especially loved how they are using the Digital Divas logo to promote the club. My friends/colleagues ran that very successful program.

The girls were very inspired to have a superhero in their midst! 

The girls have created some great characters of their own. Love these robots. Particularly the one made out of all recycled products!

Oh, and what a grande ole building! Love Melbourne 🙂 Even if it was much chillier than sunny Brisbane! 🙂

See you next time Melbourne. Oh yeh, that is for the National iAwards in 2 weeks time! 🙂

Thursday night 7.8.14 was the Annual WIC Canberra debate! I was invited to lead the “fad” team on the panel along with a group of VIPs. On my awesome team was the Gavin McCairns (Dept of Immigration and Border Protection) and Megan James (Commercial Director, Australian Data Centres). Gavin took the role of James Bond with all of his wonderful wearable techs (of course they are fad though!) and Ms Moneypenny gave her all for the team! 

On the other team we had Peter Lambert (CIO Defence Science and Technology Organisation – pic below), Roze Frost (CIO,  Department of Finance) and Brendan Smyth (MLA ACT). Peter started the debate by disguising himself as Dame Edna in a very entertaining way 🙂

A great crowd of 300! A record for WIC! We had the 3rd most trending hashtag…some not related were stealing it! A huge shout out to Kate Muir (President) and to Marie Johnson (VP) for the awesome job putting all this together with your fab sub-committee.

It was a great night catching up with old friends (Helen you are a superhero!) and also making new friends 🙂

A great night all round, looking forward to next year! 🙂

If you grabbed a tee or a book on the night, please donate to the non-profit here:

http://www.techgirlsmovement.org/donate/

I’m excited to share our adventures over the past six months with you! Thank you all for your great support! End of year (July) report here….enjoy! 🙂

Next Tuesday the Tech Girls Movement will run a session at the IBM exCITe camp on the 15th of July at the School of ICT, Griffith University, Gold Coast.

This is exciting as the Tech Girls are Chic! books have been distributed to exCITe camps all over Asia Pacific for the past six years and IBM has always been a great supporter.

All school girl participants will get a free copy of Tech Girls Are Superheroes and Jenine will encourage them to uncover their inner tech superpower. Very exciting – Jenine will be joined by Darcelle, Belinda and Chelsea from The Design Cellar, maybe you saw them at the book launch in Brisbane at the State Library? They are the creators of Kidz@GCU Hospital.

Kidz@GCU Hospital is an educational “story book” style application created by The Design Cellar – a team of four developers consisting of Chelsea McGuinness, Darcelle Hinze, Belinda Rex and Ashley Burns. 

The team originally built the app as part of their third year ICT project at Griffith University. The app is designed to assist children to become familiar with the hospital experience, and intern, help lessen the anxiety for a child visiting the hospital. The interactive app allows children to follow the journey of six different characters through their hospital visit. Through this interactive experience, the user learns about common procedures such as plaster casts and stitches, as well as hospital equipment such as X-Rays, MRI and CT Scans. The app also aims to familiarize the user with general hospital sites, sounds and the medical staff they meet along the way.

The project took out the inaugural Opmantek Prize for the best industry project at Griffith University in semester 1, 2013. More recently, the app was named as the winning project for the 2014 Queensland iAwards in the Tertiary Undergraduate Student category. The team will be represented by Chelsea McGuinness, Darcelle Hinze and Belinda Rex at the National iAwards in late August this year alongside Jenine, the Qld ICT Woman of the Year.

The free application is available for both Android and iOS devices and can be found in the Google Play and App Store. Be sure to keep an eye out for version 2 in the coming months!

Video Explaining the App – http://thedesigncellar.com.au/kidz_at_gcuh.html

Video about the Opmantek Prize – http://app.griffith.edu.au/news/2013/06/13/it-and-multimedia-students-get-competitive-edge/

Apps Facebook Page – https://www.facebook.com/kidzatgcuh

About the Superhero Team!

Darcelle is a web designer and developer at Griffith University in the eResearch and Education Resource Development team. Graduating from Griffith University in December 2013, Darcelle was awarded a university medal as the highest achieving student in her degree of Bachelor of Multimedia. 

Belinda is currently in her final year of completing a double degree in IT/Multimedia at Griffith University. She also works as a web designer and front end developer at Roundhouse Creative, in Varsity Lakes on the Gold Coast. 

Chelsea has a Bachelor of Multimedia, majoring in Visual Media Design. As a freelance web designer based on the Gold Coast, Queensland, she builds websites and content managed solutions for local businesses. 

Ashley is a software engineer with a Bachelor’s Degree in Multimedia, majoring in Internet Computing. After graduating in December 2013 with exceptional grades and highly acclaimed awards, he relocated to San Francisco, California, and now works as a Software engineer on the front end development team at Chegg (an academic company based in California, that specializes in online textbook rentals).

2nd July 2014 – The Tech Girls Movement had an amazing day at Microsoft in Sydney, hosted by the ACS. Many forward thinking mums and supportive dads bought their daughters on te school holidays to meet the Tech Girl Superheroes and to have a fun tech day out to learn more about what #techgirls do.

Nearly 200 people gathered to inspire to be Tech Girl Superheroes or to support their daughter’s tech curiosity. 

Our very own KATgirl from Team Microsoft opened the event and ran a fun icebreaker for all of the girls to get to know each other. Jewella gave an inspiring talk busting tech myths, and then Pip Marlow, the Managing Director at Microsoft who is a true Tech Girl Superhero, gave a motivating speech. Pip emphasised the importance of keeping at maths in school, and how technology is part of every industry.

Our 2014 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero patron Marie Johnson came to share her wealth of experience, along with Tech Girl Superhero Helen McHugh. Enter today and get the chance to come to the first ever Tech Girl Superhero Academy in December 2014!

Jewella, Team Microsoft made up of KATGirl, Femfighter, SKYGirl, Eureka, Sipher, and Babelbish participated in Q&A sessions with the parents, while the girls did tours of Microsoft to the gaming lab, to the executive boardroom, and they made their own Tech Girl superhero masks. 

How inspiring are these tech girls in the making? There is more to this picture below on the left. We have a secret we will share with you very soon, we will need your help!

So much fun hanging out with Team Microsoft and the ACS committee and the postgrad tech volunteers from UTS, working together to inspire young girls that they can do anything. Thank you to the organising committee Kathy Egea, Katrina Wong, Maria Hugo, Helen McHugh and to Theresa Anderson for helping to run the superhero mask sessions. Below on left are the Tech Girl Superheroes Eureka, KATgirl, Femfighter, SKYgirl and Jewella. Sipher was in an important meeting for the team’s next secret mission! Ssshhhh…

Jewella and SKYgirl and the rest of the Tech Girls Movement send you a very big thanks for being part of this awesome day 🙂

See you next time! More to come soon! Stay tuned. 

Entering the Great Hall at the Australian National University (ANU) is a great honour, let alone launching the 2014 Search for the Next Tech Girl Superhero in the Great Hall with Senator Michaelia Cash. What a buzz!

The day was focused around GetSet, an ANU program to get more girls inspired into engineering careers. With 70 girls attending and more than 50 IT industry professionals in the room, I was very proud to launch our exciting competition to tap into the brightest minds in Australia.

Senator Michaelia Cash officially launched the 2014 Search, and was genuinely inspiring in her speech. She whole-heartedly encouraged the girls in the room to reach their potential and to consider a career in engineering or technology. 

Professor John Hosking, Dean & Director, ANU College of Engineering & Computer Science was very supportive of this event, and Annabel McCabe from ANU did an amazing job in organising this inspiring day. Also proudly sponsored by the Australian Computer Society.

It was great to see Robogals, our partners also at the event.

The Senator was excited to see the guys involved in the project – you can see Dan the illustrator giving his autograph 🙂

Thanks in particular to Helen McHugh Tech Girl Superhero who drove myself, Dan and Sam (who took the pics!) from the Sydney launch the night before to the Canberra launch by 8:30 am overnight. It was a great road trip adventure that only a Tech Girl Superhero could pull off!

Lastly, we were having so much fun that we almost missed the plane! But serendipity means that we made it!!! So excited, exhausted and everything in between. What a fabulous 24 hours! This pic says it all 🙂