February 13, 2019 – March 29, 2019

During this winter, WICS worked together with Avika Patel, an NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award recipient from Woodbridge High School to arrange yet another successful AspireIT program. In this year’s #innovate program hosted at Lakeside Middle School, we conducted a series of seven workshops which introduced the girls to block coding, robotics, app development, and web development.

The first workshop was on robotics, for which we used Spheros. The students were exposed to the key concepts of rotation, speed, and direction while they tried to program the robots to move through a maze. When it came to the second day, the students had the opportunity to be creative with their projects by making games using Scratch and Makey-Makey. The projects allowed the students to incorporate unique features such as different sounds, backgrounds, and characters.

The third and fourth workshops gave a solid introduction to web development using HTML and CSS. During this transition from block-based coding to text-based coding, the students designed their own websites and personalized them using CSS features. These workshops in particular were enjoyed by the students as they were able to make very intricate and personal projects. The fifth and sixth workshops introduced the final topic of the program, app development using Thunkable. Using the simple block-based coding platform, the students were able to create interesting mobile applications and test them out on their own devices.

The seventh workshop was a project day, where the students had time to go back and create a project using the new tools they learnt about over the program.  On the final day of the program, we went on a tour to Google Irvine, where students were able to attend a panel of Google software engineers and learn more about software careers. To learn more about our future programs, sign up for the WICS newsletter!