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KidsRuby and Me!

10/3/2011

1064 Comments

 
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Introducing: Nailah a 7 year old member of the BlackGirlsCode who attended the KidsRuby programming class at Pivotal Labs in San Francisco as part of annual Golden Gate Ruby Conference on September 16-17, 2011 at UCSF Mission Bay.  Below is her blog!




Hi my name is Nailah and I am 7 years old.  I was excited to attend my first KidsRuby class.  I really didn't know what to expect but I wanted to learn how to write my very own game.  

The volunteers really made it easy to get started.  I plugged a USB into my computer, clicked on it, and then the program was installed. The teacher helped us create a cool application with different colors that we were able to explore on our own. He also showed us how to write a program to help with our homework. 

This was my very first time learning how to program and I had a really fun experience.  The one thing I liked the least about my
KidsRuby class was all that typing! (Editor Side Note: smile) What I liked the most was that I could learn to hack my homework! I don’t want to do more of that.  So I have been trying to hack my homework on my own!
~nailah
Guest Blogger 
(A 7 year old budding Ninja Coder)


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1064 Comments

A Good Day to Learn KidsRuby!

9/23/2011

812 Comments

 
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Last Sunday I attended a KidsRuby class in San Francisco which was part of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. A few other girls from our BlackGirlsCode group all came to the class with our parents and laptops ready to learn coding with Ruby.  We first downloaded the rubykidsinstaller from a small thumb drive and after that started to work. When we were working if we got an answer right our teacher would throw us a piece of candy. And he ominously warned us; “he was no baseball player!”  We learned to do a bunch of cool stuff like, making it hack our homework, and learning how to create an etch-a-sketch like application.

Overall the
KidsRuby class was really fun, interesting, and informative. One of the Ruby volunteers who was helping us in the class gave me a lot of great tips which helped me think about what was said in the class more and figure out how to do more things with the stuff we were learning. Coincidently he had a daughter with the same name! He helped me have fun in the class!  Our KidsRuby instructor also made learning to program fun and I really enjoyed being able to win candy AND learn to code.  I got so much candy that after a while the teacher asked somebody else to answer a question! I saved all the candy till the end and gobbled it all down.

I really liked the
KidsRuby class because; it wasn't too hard to understand. I also liked the class because it was really fun, and it was really helpful to learn about how to operate ruby a little bit, so I could start on my way to mastering Ruby. 
 ~kai 
Guest Blogger 
(A 12 year old budding Ninja Coder)

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812 Comments

My Techie Summer

8/5/2011

0 Comments

 
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Hi,
My name is Kai and this summer I had a mission to become a game creator. My adventure started with attending the 
Digital Media Arts Academy at Stanford University.  There I took a course on 2d and 4d game ceation. During class we were given our own game theme nick names; my name was Zelda :P.  Some of my classmates chose names as complicated as a series of numbers (that I still to this day cannot remember!) to names as easy as "No Name". We learned to make all different types of 2d games including, Multi player, Catch the Fruit, Platformers, etc.  
 
After the first day of class, our teacher (Nick) said he would give us tickets for the class raffle at the end of the week when we answered game related questions, helped other people with their games, or won a competition for the best game.  After that of course everyone was VERY helpful and VERY competitive to rack up those raffle tickets!  We kept learning how to make different types of games using Multimedia Fusion 2. The last two days of the week we spent some time learning to use a game design program called Sandbox. When using Sandbox we could create a world of our own and we were each given our own little monkey character that we could use to run around our own worlds or browse other people's worlds. The last day of camp was a scramble to rack up some last minute tickets for the raffle later in the day. On the final day of camp we showed our parents our personalized games, after this was the much waited for raffle. We kids could put as many tickets as we wanted on any item. After this exciting raffle we were each given our own certificate of completion!
 
The camp has given me a wonderful experience that I will never forget. I have been interested in gaming for most of my life, but what got me interested in building games was when my mom started coding. I thought that I could make a game just like my favorite game World of Warcraft, but then I realized that World of Warcraft is a really hard game to make.   So I am trying to make my way up to my ultimate goal
of creating a game like WoW.  The hardest thing I learned about in class was making each game and trying to do it without any glitches :(.   This may sound easy but is in fact very hard because you have to remember everything the teacher showed you and then do it yourself.  Overall my summer game building class was GREAT and I am still practicing all the things that I learned.  I am already planning to come back again next year to learn Maya.  But most of all I am still focused on learning as much as I can so that I can reach my ultimate goal--- a game way cooler than World of Warcraft!  
                
 ~kai 
Guest Blogger 
(A 12 year old budding Ninja Coder)

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0 Comments

In Search of a Black Mark Zuckerberg: Why I Founded Black Girls Code

4/10/2011

1995 Comments

 
Let’s face the facts.  For many young blacks and Hispanics in America, tech is just not...cool.  Sure, these same young people dominate the Twitterverse and the pages of Facebook.  They are definitely experts in the various forms of gaming diversions from Xbox to Nintendo. A recent report by Nielsen even suggests that African Americans and Hispanics dominate the mobile marketplace and are early adopters of new technology.  However, the concept of pulling back the curtain to any of these forms of technology -- becoming a “creator” rather than merely a “consumer” -- is as alien to many of these youth as backpacking through Istanbul.  Technology, on the surface, they know.  Technology as a creation tool? Not so much. 

In the latest installment of CNN’s pivotal docudrama Black in America 4- the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley, CNN correspondents follow a group of eight black and female founders from the NewMe Accelerator as they attempt to launch their fledgling companies by pitching their ideas to a series of investors throughout Silicon Valley.  These savvy entrepreneurs are met by roadblocks at every turn. Perhaps one of the most chilling blows is dealt when TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington states, “I don’t know any Black founders.”  Really?  In fact, black and brown tech pioneers such as John Thompson (former IBM Vice President and Symantec CEO), Gerald Lawson (now deceased he was creator of the first video game cartridge for Fairchild Semiconductor and the only black member of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 80’s with fellow members Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founders of Apple), and Frank Greene (now deceased he was a Silicon Valley pioneer and founder of Technology Development Corporation) have been making strides and outstanding contributions to the technology ecosphere for several decades. Blacks have also been pivotal in the Web2.0 internet explosion, with tech founders such as Omar Wasow of BlackPlanet creating one of the largest social networks to enter the social media space specifically targeting black consumers. 

The sad reality is that these pioneers are often “invisible” to popular culture.  While tech giants such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs become iconic and revered for their technological achievements, black and brown founders often struggle for both recognition and advancement in the booming technological ecosphere.

This lack of visibility has a very direct impact on youth from underrepresented communities.  Most African American and Hispanic youth idolize the entertainment and sports figures which have dominated popular culture; allowing Jay-Z, Lebron James, Russell Simmons, etc. to become the defacto role models to which many of our young people aspire to emulate. As a result, a focus on technology and science pursuits is eschewed for a one in a million chance of becoming the next rap/sports mogul.

My dream of starting BlackGirlsCode -- an organization focused on introducing girls of color from underrepresented communities to technology and entrepreneurship -- was born out of this frustration that “blacks in tech” are often the unmitigated invisible men (and women) in the room. We are not only invisible in theory to tech pundits such as Michael Arrington and the like; our numbers are actually so miniscule within the tech industry that we are virtually non-existent as potential role models for the thousands of African American and Hispanic youth who will be the majority of the domestic workforce within the next decade.

In his pivotal Washington Post article, “We need a Black Mark Zuckerberg” Stanford educator Vivek Wadhwa states;

“We can both improve the quality of U.S. innovation and uplift disadvantaged communities by mentoring minorities.  Ultimately, we are going to have to increase the numbers of blacks and Hispanics studying engineering and science.  Nothing will accelerate this trend more than the success of other members of these minority groups.”

 

Young people of color need role models who are a reflection of themselves to prove that success in technology and other traditional STEM fields is possible and that it is cool to be a techie.  Of course tech is not “cool” if none of the movers and shakers looks like you.  It becomes a goal that is unreachable and a self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion.  There are no visibly successful black tech founders or CEOs, so young people don’t consider the field of technology as a viable option and decide not to pursue an education in STEM fields, as a result there are too few black technologists in the pipeline to become the future Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. 

This problem of limited representation is just as striking for women in technology as for other underrepresented minorities.  In fact the number of women receiving degrees in software engineering decreased from roughly 40% of degree recipients in the mid-80’s to less than 20% of degree holders today. 

Having received my degree in Electrical Engineering some years ago, I am all too familiar with the sting of being the “one and only” throughout my career.  It is a solitary and lonely road that many women often chose to abandon when they find their careers progressing at a slower trajectory than that of their male peers. Being both black and female? Well, the struggle to reach a level of success can become even more daunting.

As Vivek states in his Wapo article, organizations such as the NewMe Accelerator, and I would add technical educational organizations such as BlackGirlsCode, YouthAppLabs (http://www.youthapplab.com) in Washington, DC,  LearntoTeach (http://learn2teach.org) in Boston, Massachusetts, and HackChange (http://www.hackchange.com) in New York City, have the ability to both drive and improve the quality of US innovation while uplifting underrepresented communities. As society becomes increasingly more technologically driven, it is imperative that our young people have the skills required to compete and thrive in the new millennium economy.   The ability to code and fully utilize all of the technological tools at their disposable is an extremely important skill set for young people to possess.

I founded BlackGirlsCode with the specific goal of creating opportunities for girls of color to envision themselves as the “masters of their technological universe”.  I am in search of the next (Black) Mark Zuckerberg.  Above all I am hopeful that she will forge a NEW pathway towards innovation and social impact that will change the equation for future generations of black and brown creators and leaders in technology.  It is a mission that is long overdue.



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Kimberly Bryant
Founder, BlackGirlsCode

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    Kimberly Bryant
    Founder, BlackGirlsCode.com

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