Students are back in school as the fall has begun (despite what the thermometer tells you).
For some students, it was a productive summer.
About two dozen girls participated in the Pearls in Tech program, which stopped in at Valencia College in July. It’s part of the Tech Sassy Girlz program, which works to build a future workforce by transforming the lives of adolescent girls to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields through career readiness, mentoring and entrepreneurship.
The program, much like any computing class these days, focused on the AI — not just using it to provide life hacks and shortcuts, but how to program it to solve real-world problems.
Teenage girls who likely had never heard of Evoberry (a chat bot building platform) and Python (the programming language, not the scaly reptile) were putting what they’d learn on display—and earning a Google industry certification and a small stipend while doing it.
For example, Lyric Williams, Lilian Brandan and Bianca Mendez, now sophomores at Osceola and St. Cloud High schools, developed a chat box called “Lunchbox”, designed to help their fellow students choose their school lunches based on their activities and other needs.
“Some kids like don’t eat lunch and sometimes they have to go home hungry,” Mendez said. “With this chatbot, you could act like within your diets or have allergies to get the right food.”
“I myself am a picky eater,” Williams said. “If you have a big game coming up, what you should do before, if you’re like myself.”
Poinciana High juniors Angelissa Aguayo and Marissa Jeantty developed “MediHelp”, an AI module to assist students who want to get into medical fields with selecting the courses that will have them best aligned to enter those college tracks prepared.
“I wanted to help with readiness, and she wants to be in the medical field, so we combined to meet a goal,” Aguayo said.
Jeanty called the Tech Sassy Girlz program “a cool opportunity.”
“Even though I had no interest at the beginning being like with coding, once I entered this program, I realized AI’s not just for cheating,” she said.
While Aguayo admits “I don’t know what career I want to be in yet,” she said a good chat box, “Will help me figure that out, or help other students like me. This isn’t so much about having the answers, but finding a reliable way to get them.”
Said Jeanty: “There’s multiple questions depending on the type of student. Some students know exactly what they want to do in the medical field. Some students know they want to be in the medical field, but they don’t know a specialty.”
It’s another way to provide girls in grades 6–12 with exposure and access to STEM fields through hands-on learning experiences while connecting with women leaders and network with industry professionals, all the way up to interning with tech companies.
Corporations like Electronic Arts, Lockheed Martin, the Orlando Magic, Infosys are corporate partners with Career Source of Central Florida, which has been putting on the program for years.
Dr. Laine Powell, Founder and CEO, was on hand at the July 30 event.
“I watched a room of teenagers go from what’s a variable to create working AI chatbots in Python solving problems in their own backyard,” she said. “This is what success looks like: “A girl who was told she ‘wasn’t a STEM kid’ walking into a classroom, learning to code in Python, earning a stipend to learn AI, and walking out with an industry certification from Google and a completely different opinion of herself.”
