Girls4STEAM is a hackathon event hosted by the Kent State Student Chapter for American Computing Machinery-Women in partnership with the Research Center for Educational Technology (RCET) of Kent State’s College of Education, Health & Human Services. The event is designed to inspire young women in grades 7 through high school to be creators of technological innovations - not just consumers of technology - who use technology as a creative tool to build solutions for problems or challenges people face in their daily lives. We believe that engaging students in STEAM opportunities (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) will empower them with the necessary knowledge and skills to thrive in their future careers and to ultimately change our world through their application of teamwork, creativity, and technology. It is our mission that all students - particularly females and youth - have access to such critical learning opportunities. Working toward that end, this event will engage young women in rich STEAM opportunities through collaborative hands-on experiences to design and create a technology product such as a game, website, app, or other hardware hack. Our goal is that the event will ignite participants’ excitement for STEAM as they build expertise with digital tools for coding, programming, and design. We believe participants will leave the event with increased self-confidence, new ways of thinking as well as important collaborative skills that will give them a competitive advantage when applying to colleges, internships and jobs.
More information about the event, including registration information, can be found here: https://sites.google.com/kent.edu/girls4steam/home