“It was a little mind-wracking when you had to change it, fix it,” she said. “We just thought it through, like do we need (to make it turn at) a 40 degree angle or something else?”
Arissa, 11, was attending her third Geek Squad Academy, a summer camp put on by Best Buy and Junior Achievement of Utah. It aims to help students become confident in their ability to learn about technology, a goal shared by organizers of similar Utah summer programs, educators and policy-makers who see computer programming skills as crucial for future careers – especially for girls, as women lag in lucrative tech fields.
But among the Utah campers building robots, designing video games and experimenting with 3-D printers, boys continue to outnumber girls.
David Johnson runs the GREAT – Graphics and Robotics Exploration with Amazing Technology – summer camp at the University of Utah for kids who want to learn about programming.
This year, about 600 students enrolled – and about 18 percent are girls. It’s ironic, he said, because girls have unique skills.
“It’s almost always the girls camp that does the best; they’re more competitive,” he said. “They’re a little better at staying on task and persevering.”
He said, he found the best teams included girls or were exclusively girls.
“I know these boys have sisters. It doesn’t seem to cross the parents’ minds to send the girls to the camps as well,” he said. “It’s really unfair to be eliminating a large portion of the population from trying (technology) out.”
Jake Muehle, a recent graduate of the master’s program in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering department, is helping teach sessions for middle school and high school students this summer.
“The girls are typically really bright and motivated,” he said. “Because of their age, they’re more mature, so they do a lot less goofing around than boys, who a lot of the time are there to kind of mess around.”
At the Geek Squad Academy, Arissa and her team quickly reprogrammed their robot with Lego Mindstorms software and corrected its route.
She likes working in a group, she said, because “We get to share each other’s ideas, and new ideas can come from those. We have a better chance of figuring it out.”.
National Geek Squad Academy agent Brittani Uribe cites herself as a success story for the program, which she first attended when she was 17. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in communications and has been a Geek Squad agent with Best Buy for three years.
“You can see a drastic change” in girls who attend, she said while working at the Salt Lake City academy. “When they come in, the girls seem disinterested; and at the end, little girls come to me and say, ‘I want to be a Geek Squad agent.’”
She added, “My message to these girls is that you can do whatever you want.”
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