For the third year in a row, Diverse Computing teamed up with the SciGirls Coding Camp for a half-day user-experience design project. Co-hosted at the DCI HQ by marketing assistants Tiffany Lui and Mia Weinand, the project entailed having the 13 middle-school girls come up with app ideas and design them via white boards and dry erase markers.
The session started out with the entire group brainstorming app ideas. The girls then split up into 5 teams and each team chose an app to design. They were then each given a workstation, a pack of dry erase markers, and approximately 1 hour to bring their ideas to life. The ideas varied from a personal stylist app that choose the users’ outfit for them, to a nutrition app that allowed the user to scan a barcode and see its allergens, calories, and more, to a picture editing app that gave the user suggestions on how to edit their photos, to a restaurant finding app, and finally, an educational game that taught users about endangered animals and had options to donate to charities that helped those species.
When the girls were finished designing, the co-hosts brought in the judge to decide the winner. Each group had the opportunity to pitch their app to product manager Melissa Ehster. She asked the girls detailed questions and then graded them based on 5 criteria: ease of use, overall design, concept/uniqueness, organization and detail, and overall presentation. Based on these factors, the educational animal game team was crowned the winner and each member was awarded an Amazon gift card.
SciGirls is a two-week hands-on summer camp funded by the National Science Foundation. Its mission is to spark girls’ interest in STEM. The all-girl camp is supported by an all-female team of teachers and guest scientists.
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