Are girls allowed in Google's tool shop? Just wondering.

Today I read an article in my local paper about Google workshops that provide a few select employees opportunities to create things with state-of-the art "shop" tools.  I went on to the Google blog and read the following post:


Google Workshops: a place for Googlers to get their hands dirty


Are girls allowed?  Just wondering.


I hope that the percentage of women who access the Google workshops is on par with the percentage of females who are employed at Google. 


Although there have been efforts to increase the number of females who pursue careers in engineering, computer science, and related technical fields, progress has been slow.  If you walk through an "average" high school, you are likely to find that there are few female student enrolled in classes such as computer programming, computer-assisted design (CAD), or engineering technology.   



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Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics


Engineering Your Life: A guide to engineering for high school girls


Get Smart Get WISE (Women in Information Science and Engineering, North Carolina Technology Association)


IEEE Women in Engineering


NCWIT: National Center for Women and Information Technology
"In 2009 women earned only 18 percent of all CS [computer science] degrees. Back in 1985, women earned 37 percent of CS degrees."

WEPAN:  Women in Engineering ProActive Network
Record number of girls to take part in Tech Challenge 2011
Sandeep Ravindran, Mercury News, 4/28/11


Women in Engineering:  21 Remarkable Stories
MichiganEngineering, University of Michigan

FYI:

I am old enough to remember a time when girls were strongly discouraged from taking shop classes.  In my case, when I was in high school,  I was told that auto mechanics courses were not appropriate for college-bound students.  My only option was to take a short powder puff mechanics class in the summer!   Despite scoring at the top of the scale on a measure of mechanical reasoning, I was steered towards pursuing a career in a helping profession.   

Multi-touch application developed by an all-women team from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology for the Imagine Cup Competition

According to a recent article from the Microsoft News Center, "statistics from high schools and universities suggest that percentage won’t change any time soon. Only 17 percent of Advanced Placement (AP) computer science test-takers in 2008 were women, even though women represented more than half of all AP test-takers. At the college level, fewer than one in five computer and information science degrees were awarded to women."


Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition is a way to encourage female students that they can use technology to help make the world a better place, and that computer science is a field that provides an outlet for creativity a innovation.

One of the teams that participated in the Imagine Cup Competition was "Team Blob". The young women in this team attend South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Their work can be seen in the video presentation of Team Blob's Multi-touch Designer, which allows teachers to create multi-touch presentations for their students. The application was written in C# using Windows Presentation Foundation.


The team developed a interactive timeline to highlight history's famous women in math and science, and demonstrated it on a 40-inch multi-touch table to girls who visited their university campus. The time-line can be seen in the video clip at about 3:34.

"Team Blob members, from left, Lori Rebenitsch, Robyn Krage and Jaelle Scheuerman demo their application that aims to bring emerging multitouch technology into K-12 classrooms. The all-woman team is from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology."

Links to posts about Singularity University, Designing for the Internet of Things, etc.

Here are a variety of links from the The World Is My Interface blog:

Singularity University? What about a Singularity Community College, with a mobile/distance learning option?

David Orban's Internet of Things & Spime Design presentation at the Singularity University 2009

The IBM Web or Internet of Things: "A Smarter Planet"

News about Smart Grids and Smart Kitchens

LTE vs WiMax: Trying my best to understand emerging technologies....

Pervasive Computing, DOOH, Intelligent Buildings, Programmable Nano-based Sensors, Privacy & Security, & Ethics...hmmm

Still a dream: Ubiquitous Women in Technology