Girls 4STEAM: Chic to be Geek!

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This week in the AT&T Classroom, RCET is hosting Girls 4STEAM: Chic to be Geek, a camp designed to ignite girls’ excitement for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math)  as they build expertise with digital tools for coding, programming, and design.

At the start of the camp, the girls were introduced to binary code, a system utilizing numbers 1 and 0 in strings to create code. The girls designed bracelets by stringing together bead sequences representing their birthdates in binary code.

The girls have also been working with two programmable robots, Edisons and Ozobot Bits. Both have built-in sensors that respond to light and sound changes and can be programmed to travel lines and communicate with other robots. The girls learned to program the Ozobot Bits using “static codes” composed of various color sequences alternating combinations of red, blue, and green. The girls were introduced to two different tools for programming their Edisons  - Python, a text-based coding language, and EdBlocks, a graphical programming language that utilizes a drag-and-drop interface. The Edisons are compatible with LEGO bricks so the girls are able to design and add LEGO models to their Edison projects. The girls were excited to design and program their own Edison catapults and compete for the longest toss.