Increase Slovak girls participation in technology

It's quite simple, but it requires long-term work with start in primary school. Especially in mathematics.

It requires parents work of those girls and teachers who teach them. Jo B. in the book "Mathematical feelings" discusses many researchs into mathematics and the human condition in society.

Research has found (Good, Rattan and Dweck, 2012) why people continue or do not continue to study mathematics. It is hiding behind this sense of belonging. (In other words, how they feel to be members of the mathematical group and how are they accepted to this group by it's authority.)

How strong is the sense of community concerns pupil / student / person, predicts whether he will deal with mathematics in the future.

The researchers then calculated which are the reasons behind the weak feeling of belonging. And two are quite shocking:

1. Sense of mathematics is innate and immutable capability.

2. Women are considered to be less capable than men.

These two reasons have an impact mainly on the girls. For boys there were hardly considered at all. Therefore, the girls less engaged in math and therefore score worse than boys.

The researchers further found that girls who had a stronger sense of belonging, remained devoted to mathematics later in life.

When the girls meet with the statement that mathematics can be improved, and that there is no sense or talent for math, these girls achieve the same results than boys.

First workshops in Scratch coding language for girls aged 12 to 16 years, happened in Bratislava and Kosice. These workshops are the first steps in the Slovak national competition Scratch match, which will be organized by Aj Ty v IT from January 2017. We have received a lot of very positives feedbacks, which are really showing us, that young girls are attracted by technology and are able to code, discover and create!

The aim of the Scratch Match competition is to put together teams of three girls and push them in the cooperation and creation. The output of their work depends of their ideas – can be game, animation, video or what else. The public presentation at the end will bring them knowledge in soft and communication skills, which is not so common in these day in this age group.

Discussions with IT women professionals are one of our favorite activities. Girls need to have role models, need to heard their live stories. Travelling from Dallas center of AT&T, the President of Integrator Solution, Anne Chow, passed through Kosice at the east of Slovakia and discussed with high school girls from different schools. Thanks’!

The idea of attracting young girls into IT isn’t so common in Slovakia. It’s why we need to work a lot with companies, high schools, universities, others institutions. In September, two of our Board committee members, participated at Datalan University Day, focused on new technologies for education. Talk show, where they took a place, was very successful and raise a lot of questions from public.

During Slovak presidency in European parliament, the conference about e-skills job happened in Bratislava. It was a good opportunity for us to present our opinion about the topic of Women in STEM fields.