Sourabh Lal

EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

GirlsCoding Mini-Hackathon

During LauzHack 2017 we hosted the GirlsCoding mini-hackathon. This is one of a series of events organized by GirlsCoding with the aim of improving gender diversity in the computer science industry by introducing girls aged 13 to 15 years old to coding. The event included a non-technical introduction to information encoding, Python and Git, and a small project combining the three. You can see the event schedule here. I was scheduled to give a workshop introducing Git and GitHub, but unfortunately it was cancelled due to time constraints. The event was concluded by visiting the hackers participating in LauzHack.

Some feedback from the girls:

  • “We find it absolutely amazing that the hackers code these cool projects in just 24 hours”
  • “We really would like to learn computer science at school. We think it is something very basic we should know”