Teen Girls In Science and Technology
How a 15-year-old Coder Balances Her Work and Life
Keila Banks is only 15 years old, but she has a good message on work-life balance, and she’s running with it.
Banks is a coder from Los Angeles, and she has been giving talks since she was 11. She has spoken at an Open Source event before 4,000 people, and she has spoken at a computer science event at the White House. She’s a self-taught programmer and web designer. Her father takes her around to various events around the world.
Teen Inventor, Anya Pogharian, Takes Portable Dialysis Machine To The World
Anya Pogharian never thought her high school science fair project would bring her international attention and job opportunities from around the world. "India, Australia, Russia, Armenia — like everywhere, just everywhere. South America. You name it, I got a message from there," said Pogharian. Ontario-based health-care firm Baxter Corp. offered to sponsor her and provide her with filters.
Pogharian said she heard from dialysis patients right across Canada, congratulating her and wishing her success. She was 17 when she invented a cheap, portable dialysis machine.
Teen Develops Mobile App That Analyzes Speech Patterns & Predicts If A Person Has Parkinson's Disease
Even at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-ranked magnet school, senior Pooja Chandrashekar stands out among her brainiac peers. She’s got a 4.57 grade-point average, scored a 2390 (out of 2400) on the SAT, and aced all 13 of her Advanced Placement exams. But that not what makes her so special. What makes her great is that she also founded a national nonprofit organization that encourages middle-school girls to participate in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs. And just as important, she has developed a mobile app that analyzes speech patterns and predicts with 96 percent accuracy if a person has Parkinson’s disease.
Aashan Mongo Is Already An Accomplished High Tech Teen Tech of Silicon Valley
Aashna Mago, 19 years old and from Newtown, Pennsylvania, came out to join us and perched on a table. She moved into Castro House in April, after leaving Stanford to work for Rothenberg Ventures, a VC firm with a focus on virtual reality. At the firm, she works with portfolio companies, writes code, and stitches together video to create virtual-reality scenes.
Katherine Wu, 14, Invented a Way for Drivers to Stay Awake
Nearly every driver has experienced that wave of exhaustion, where it becomes almost impossible to stay awake at the wheel. While 14-year-old Katherine Wu is too young to have experienced this situation firsthand, she noticed how difficult it was for her dad to remain alert while driving back from their family vacations in Florida to their home in North Potomac, Maryland. Her mom would talk to her dad to keep him awake to prevent an accident.
15-Year-Old Brook Martin Appears On Shark Tank With Her ICPooch
15-year-old tech entrepreneur Brooke Martin of Spokane, Wash., made her debut on Shark Tank — pitching her invention, iCPooch, a video conferencing device and remote treat dispenser for pets. (All the more remarkable, Brooke was only 14 when the episode was recorded.)
Nina Devani, 16, Creates App To Help You Remember Passwords
Specialising in computer security software, Devani launched the company’s first app Prompt Me Nina after her father’s Facebook account was hacked. Having had trouble remembering his various different passwords, Devani came up with a solution – an app which would prompt you on both usernames and passwords without having to give away your actual passwords.
How This Teen Turned Her High School Internship Into A Game Design Career
Paulina Raguimov never expected to get paid to make video games when she walked into her high school’s career fair at 16. She played them, sure. But when she walked up to the JumpStart booth to chat about the internships they had available, she had absolutely no experience with making games. “I didn’t even have a resume, I had only just become eligible to get a job at all,” she told me last week.
The Teenage Girls Behind The World's Only Tampon Video Game
These high school students created the game, which just released a mobile version, to make a point—periods might be a normal part of women's lives, but most of us aren't comfortable talking about them. The girls wanted to start changing that taboo, in part by making people laugh.
The 16-Year-Old Girls From Ireland Who Won The Top Prize At The Google Science Fair
Using bacteria to combat the global food crisis? A trio of Irish 16-year-olds from Cork County, Ireland, came up with this project, which took the grand prize in the competition. After extensive tests, the students discovered that two naturally-growing strains of Rhizobium bacteria--which have a symbiotic relationship with legumes--speed up the germination process of barley and oats by 50%, and increase crop yield by an average of 30%.
How One Teen Invented a Wearable Device to Help the Newly Blind
On the surface, 18-year-old Jordana Gotlieb may seem like a typical high school senior at Milken Community Schools in Los Angeles. She’s involved in sports — varsity swimming and varsity water polo — as well as high school clubs like the robotics club and the United Synagogue Youth. And, like many other seniors across the country, she’s eagerly waiting to hear back from colleges — particularly the University of Southern California and Georgia Tech.
But most other high school seniors can’t say they’ve successfully created a product designed to help the blind or visually impaired, entered it into numerous competitions and placed high every time.
I’m an engineer, not a cheerleader. Let’s abandon silly rules about gender
The fact that women are missing from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields is not a secret. But as a teenage scientist deeply involved in science and engineering while still in high school, I see the problem as a straightforward one: I believe that in their earliest years, girls lose their spark—they succumb to societal hurdles and mental obstacles that have existed for as long as they can remember.
Read About Teen Coding Phenom, Laura Wilson
Laura's come a long way from her prior misconceptions about Computer Science being "an old man in a dark environment coding zeroes and ones." Laura has been featured in The Daily Beast, The New York Post, had the opportunity to participate in a variety of coding workshops at Spotify and Microsoft, attended the Paley Center For Media's "Cracking The Code: Media's portrayal of Women in STEM, was invited to a private screening of the movie,"The Imitation Game," attended Glamour's Woman of the Year awards ceremony, and (in her spare time?) volunteered at Mount Sinai in the pathology department.
The State of STEM: How Girls Are Changing the Face of Science
In school, I was like most girls. A promising student who, over time, found myself focusing more and more on reading and writing and less and less on math and science. Maybe that's because I was naturally more interested in those fields—or maybe it's because my math and science teachers never expected me to do as well as their male students, never pushed me as hard, never encouraged me forward.
Girl Makes An Unbreakable, Spill-Proof Cup For Her Ailing Grandfather & Raises Over $60,000
While most 11-year-olds are watching Hunger Games or doing other typically pre-teen things, Lily Born, of Chicago, is busy designing unbreakable, un-spillable kitchenware to help people with Parkinson’s disease. She raised over $60,000 in a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to develop the product.
Teen Who Invented A Body-Heat Powered Lamp
Philipino-Canadian Ann Makosinski caught media’s attention after winning the 2013 Google Science Fair in the 15-16 age group category. She was named one of Time magazine’s 30 Under 30 Youth Changing the World, and was featured on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” NBC News, PBS, Yahoo News and more. Makosinski has become an inspiration to youth around the world, showing that one can invent the future—with inspiration, curiosity and a desire to work towards a goal.
Meet the Exhibitors in the White House Science Fair
After surviving a bout with a rare liver cancer at age 12, Elana Simon, now 18, teamed up with one of the surgeons who treated her, set up shop in a medical lab, and began to collect much-needed data about the rare illness she'd endured. She gathered tissue samples from patients coping with the same cancer, fibrolamellar, performed genomic sequencing tests, and found a common genetic mutation across all of the samples she collected. Elana's results were published in the top journal Science, and formed a basis for a new website, the Fibrolamellar Registry, which she built to help empower fibrolamellar patients to share their own medical data for use by researchers working to find a cure.
Girls Who Code Expands To Get More Young Women In Computer Science Majors
The computer science gender gap struggle in Silicon Valley is real. A mere 17 percent of Google’s tech workers are women. It’s 15 percent at Facebook. Similar stats can be found at most of the larger tech companies. Girls Who Code is trying to reverse those digits with an announcement of a major expansion in partnerships today. The non-profit organization that aims to close the gender gap in technology will grow its Summer Immersion Program from 19 sessions reaching 375 girls to 60 sessions reaching 1,200 girls this year.