Support Young Aspiring Mexican Tech Inventors

Evelyn is seven years old and lives in the State of Mexico’s municipality of Nezahualcoyotl. During last summer, she enrolled in the Maker’s Camp course at the RIA center and she loved it so much that now she considers herself part of the Maker Culture, with big and innovative ideas to develop.

Before this experience, Evelyn had only taken courses in basic programming and had very little experience with the use of computers. Even though she was the youngest girl in the Makers Camp course, she wasn’t afraid to fully exploit all the knowledge she could get from it. As a result, Evelyn learned how electricity works, what is conductivity and how electronic circuits work. Also, she learned how to use a welding machine to create fun, innovative and creative projects.

What Evelyn liked the most about Makers Camp was that she created a new project from scratch, which helped her boost her creativity. Furthermore, she learned the basic principles of stop-motion animation, how to create circuits on paper and how to interact with a computer through a Makey Makey device.

During the camp, Evelyn met Andrea, another 11-year old girl. Together, they learned to do activities like welding and circuit building which they thought were restricted to adult boys only. However, thanks to this experience they now know that girls can also learn about programming apps, an activity on which they worked for their final project which was a piano that used bananas as keys.

Evelyn’s enthusiasm encouraged her classmates because of her willingness to finish every activity. Given this attitude, the instructor made her a role model for the rest of the class; “If little Evelyn can do it, so do you big guys!”

What do you think other girls like Evelyn can do with tools like this?