Jean MacDonald, a partner at Smile Software, is on a mission to get girls into the world of science and technology -- through summer camp. With her App Camp For Girls, which will hold its first summer sessions in a couple of weeks in Portland, Ore., she hopes to encourage young women to be excited about developing applications for phones and tablets.
According to the camp's IndieGogo page:
App Camp for Girls wants to address the gender imbalance among software developers by giving girls the chance to learn how to build apps, to be inspired by women instructors, and to get exposure to software development as a career. Our goal is to grow our non-profit organization into a national force, with programs in multiple cities, helping thousands of girls.
MacDonald first got the idea for App Camp when she attended the Apple Developers Conference. "I was in a session with over a thousand developers and I realized from where I was sitting I couldn't even see another woman ... and that's when I realized there's so few women creating iPhone and iPad apps," she said in a video promoting the nonprofit project.
The camp consists of one-week sessions for girls ages 12 to 14. These young women will be given the opportunity to develop their own application ideas with the guidance of women who develop apps for a living.
We think that this is an amazing way to start closing the gender gap in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). Because, as Bill Nye the Science Guy says, "Science rules!" So ... why didn't this exist when we were teens?
[H/T The Frisky]
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