“Technology is about solving human needs and must be for everyone. Therefore, both girls and boys must drive the technology development together”, says Anuradha Sridharan.
“Anu” is passionate about getting both boys and girls to start coding. In addition to her job as a consultant at Cegal, she also runs the YoungCoderz project and holds coding weekend courses and summer schools for children and youth.
Through YoungCoderz, she experiences the same as many others, and as this article at Statistics Norway shows – there is a large deficit of girls in technology subjects at schools and in professions.
“When I heard about Girl Tech Fest two years ago, I thought that this is a great opportunity for Cegal to help get more girls interested in coding and technology.”
Anu Sridharan, Cegal
Girl Tech Fest is an initiative to increase girls’ interest in technology and science where girls in fourth and fifth grade get a different school day filled with practical technology tasks. At Girl Tech Fest the girls get to be creative and innovative – and they get to experience that the IT industry also consists of women and girls.
ODA Network, TENK (Tech network for women), ICT Norway and the National Center for Science Recruitment are behind this initiative. This year, over 1,500 girls participated in 17 different events in cities and communities across the country.
Cegal works strategically to increase diversity and to hire more women in the technology industry, both in management and among the technologists.
“A high proportion of women and a diverse workforce are an important reason why Cegal has had a strong growth and success in the market. Therefore, we also support initiatives such as Girl Tech Fest, which we hopefully can reap from in a few years”
CEO Dagfinn Ringås in Cegal
In Oslo, Girl Tech Fest took place at the Norwegian Technical Museum. 100 girls were registered and attended the technology party. 11 workshops were arranged, and Cegal was responsible for two of them. Over 60 ten-to-twelve-year-old's attended “teaching” in robotics and tried to program a small robot.
Cegal provided Daria Kormacheva, Sarah E. rayfuse and Ellina Ivleva as tutors, in addition to Anu Sridharan.
“It was great to see how curious the girls become about technologies when they get the opportunity to try it themselves. For some it was important to complete the task as quickly as possible, for others it was exciting to just do their own thing with the robots. For me as a tutor, the most important thing was that the girls became eager to learn more about technology after the session was over”, says Ellina Ivleva, consultant at Cegal.
“My experience is that when girls get to try out the technology hands on, with practical tasks and games, it increases the girls’ interest. They want to understand how technology works and how it can be used. In the Cegal workshop, we connected programming and robotics in a fun and engaging way so that the students could test exactly how their programs controlled the robots”, Sridharan says.
The experience from YoungCoderz is that most girls are more patient and persistent than boys when it comes to writing code, and that they often are more creative.
“It was fun to introduce programming and then see the girls use their skills and creativity to get the robots through the labyrinths. It was also very fun to see that some of the girls were curious to learn about instructions we hadn’t talked about. Being a part of Girl tech Fest was obviously inspiring for the girls who attended the event. That was also the case for me as a tutor”, says Sarah E. Rayfuse, who works as a front-end developer at Cegal.
“The girls were very enthusiastic and interested. With a little help, they managed challenging routes in the labyrinth and changed light and sound while the robot was running. The time passed so fast and most of them wanted to solve more tasks. Some even wanted to take the robots home”
Daria Kormacheva, senior consultant at Cegal
“It’s been fantastic! I have never seen so many ten-to-twelve-year-old's be focused for so long”, says Martine Østlie, one of the initiators for Girl Tech Fest and project manager at National Center for Science Recruitment, to CW.no.