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Friday, May 22, 2009
Microsoft’s DigiGirlz Day helps girls tackle tech
By Lynette F. Cornell, Special to Mass High Tech
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A crowd of giggling girls huddles around a low table. They arrange colored cubes in a straight line, discussing which pieces should go where and gesturing vividly with their hands. When they finish, a video camera scans the bar codes on the cubes and communicates the commands to a small robot that responds by dancing the hokey-pokey as the girls cheer with excitement.
It’s a Monday morning, and these high school students are among 177 girls playing with science at Microsoft Corp.’s DigiGirlz Day.
At Microsoft’s New England Research and Development site in Cambridge, the girls programmed miniature robots, made musical Play-Doh, learned about Internet safety and discovered how architects used math to gut two floors of the research center without compromising the building’s structural integrity.
The day’s activities were part of 25 free one-day events happening around the world, designed to keep girls interested in science and math.
“We just don’t have young girls going into technology,” said Jennifer Tour Chayes, NERD’s managing director. “The perception of technology is that it is not creative.”
In a society that discourages females in technology, said Chayes, many girls are missing out on great careers. The industry is also missing out on fantastic technology, she said.
Speaking to the group of girls, Chayes shared her story of dropping out of high school and getting married at age 19 to later become a co-author of nearly 100 technical papers and the co-inventor of more than 20 patents.
“It doesn’t have to be a straight line from where you are to where you are going,” she said. “You can take a lot of detours. It’s okay.”
Science is losing girls in their early teens, said Chayes. The reason, she said, is that science is not considered attractive. She was teased when she was 12 years old for being good at math, and now says that same type of social response is still going on.
One girl challenging stereotypes about girls who like math is Fenway High School student Stacy Ogierumwense. The independent 18-year-old describes her passions: computer science, biology and mechanical engineering.
She is frustrated, though, at the limits she faces in the classroom. To her, math and science are important, but in order to take challenging math courses, she had to look outside her high school by cross-registering at Emmanuel College.
“It puts you at a disadvantage for the school you want to go to,” she said.
For her, that meant applying to MIT and being rejected. Looking out across the Charles River, she pointed and said, “There’s my high school, right there across the river.”
The distance isn’t great, but for Ogierumwense, there is no educational bridge between Boston’s public school system and the elite school she hopes to attend. Attending DigiGirlz Day, she said, “solidified my career choice more.”
Lynette Cornell is a freelance writer in Manchester, N.H.
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