On Friday, March 6th, Microsoft New England held our annual DigiGirlz Day at our Kendall Square office with 130 attendees, providing middle and high school girls with a better understanding of careers in technology.
We had a great day using Twitter (#DigiGirlzMA) and giving away fun prizes including a Surface raffle.
We started off the day with an inspiring Keynote from Lydia Smyers, Senior Director, US Education Marketing & Programs as well as an introduction to careers at the retail stores with Carin Kuehl, Human Resource Manager, Northeast Stores
Students were loving workshops featuring everything from Game Development with TouchDevelop taught by Eliza Mulcahy and Lisa Casillo from the Microsoft Store to an Hour of Code (Construct 2) with DX’s Gavin Bauman to a Social Media Workshop with Social Media Strategists and entrepreneurs, Lauren Metter, Lyssa Goldberg and team from Metter Media. They also were excited to see our innovation in technology at the MTC’s Envisioning & Interactive Center with Hitakshi Nanavaty and Chad Gronbach. At lunch, the girls also had a valuable Career Discussion with college interns from our campus Foundry program.
“Our school began offering a programming elective last year and we found very quickly that the stigmas around computer programming young students have, especially girls, are real to them and sometimes hard to break,” said Adam Newall, Computer Programming/Math Applications teacher at Pembroke Community Middle School. “DigiGirlz was incredibly effective at showing our female students these are skills leading to an exciting future which is open to anyone. To say they had a great time would be a tremendous understatement. They loved every minute of the day from hearing other young women talk about the exciting careers in technology to trying their hand at making a game. The group of girls who went have been talking about it nonstop!”
“The girls had an awesome day,” said Sasha Lu, Associate Director of Program Collaborations at the Girl Scouts of Eastern MA. “They asked if they could live here.”
Ive learned that computers are really cool & I wanna work for Microsoft. @msftcitizenship @mettermedia #digigirlzMa pic.twitter.com/XkFiEeZawa
— Kerri Albert (@kerrirocks5) March 6, 2015
Can I go back to creating games and coding games because it was really fun #DigigirlzMa — Avery reid (@miserologist) March 6, 2015
Special thanks to others involved in helping to make our event a success: Allison Knight, Erin Beauregard, Jessica Borislow, Aster Hishe, Jenn Kwiatkowski, George Matthews, and John Harlow.