IT Summer School Women4women
October 07, 2022
In the last week before the return to schools, 28.08. – 03.09.2022, CAISA Lab has organized the IT Summer School for high school female students that are passionate about mathematics and/or computer science. The classes were designed and held by our female AI researchers*, with the rest of our lab members** contributing to the preparation and organization. The event was generously supported by Hessian.AI.
Participants of the IT Summer School, coming from various corners of Germany, had the opportunity to spend a week at Philipps-Universität Marburg with our computer science professors and PhD students in a confidential and relaxed atmosphere. With ease they learnt to program the humanoid robot Pepper and to develop real video games, first with Scratch and then with Python. All the created teaching materials (lecture slides, code, guidelines, example solutions) are available on our GitHub and free for anyone to use! here
Our main goal was to show that nobody needs to fear programming, especially when working together in a team and having fun on the versatile creative tasks. We also jointly enjoyed a rich accompanying evening program, including paddle boats, board games, city tours, culinary experiences, and an invited talk and discussion with Dr. Astrid Bendix from the MAFEX startup founding center.
Here’s some feedback from our participants:
„Während der Summer school habe ich neue Freundschaften geschlossen, die auch noch bis jetzt halten. Wir haben uns von Anhieb auf alle gut Verstanden, weil wir alle das Interesse am Programmieren teilen.”
“Es war eine schöne Erfahrung zu wissen, dass es doch noch mehr Mädchen gibt, die dieselben Interessen teilen. Es hat mich dazu ermutigt weiter auf dem Pfad der Naturwissenschaften zu bleiben, da ich auch meine Bedenken dazu hatte.”
“Wir haben das Programmieren gelernt haben und im Nachhinein spannende Aktivitäten unternommen, wie zum Beispiel Tretboot fahren. Die Summer School hat richtig viel Spaß gemacht und ist vor allem sehr abwechslungsreich und interessant gewesen.“
We at CAISA also loved the week and are looking forward to repeating it in the future!
*(Sofia Romero, Teresa Dreyer, Jana Holznigenkemper, Allie Lahnala, Flora Sakketou, Lucie Flek) **(Joan Plepi, Charlie Welch, Vahid Sadiri Javadi, Akbar Karimi, Shaina Ashraf)