Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Urban Alliance Public Speaking Challenge

Dima Al Falahi


Urban Alliance hosts a Public Speaking Challenge for our Washington DC area interns each year.

They give a $100 bonus to those who are in the top 20% of the rubric metrics.  

Of course we like hearing or seeing the reflections shared by our interns just as much as the great work they do for us.



Nina Le

Jose Perez






Friday, June 15, 2018

Augmented Reality in Falls Church City Public Schools

Last summer our H-B Woodlawn and Yorktown high school interns Ben, Bryan, Alex and Eddy built an augmented reality sandbox with one of long-time favorite teachers Carey Pollock and some great folks from NoVa Labs (retired engineers Nick Carter and Sharon Dempsey).  The NoVa Labs folks built their own the following semester.

Carey aimed even higher, developing a plan with a detailed budget that could be replicated by teachers confidently.  She also applied for funding from the Falls Church Education Fund, which always seems receptive to integrated science and technology learning projects. 

Carey's students finished this week.


Saturday, June 9, 2018

Wearable Technology Workshop

Our CyberJutsu Girls partner put on another great workshop today for girls in grades 5 and up (through high school).


Monday, June 4, 2018

Boolean Girl Fundraiser

Student programs

The key program element of Boolean Girl is a progressive, age-appropriate, long-term learning path for our students. Central to our approach is early and consistent engagement.
In small class sizes facilitated by trained instructors, we provide progressively challenging sets of projects that bridge the middle school years. We know our content appeals to girls, because we’ve tested, refined, and improved it. We’ve taught hundreds of girls in camps and schools, and we’ve found a couple of broad themes: girls tend to like projects that have a story; they tend to gravitate toward collaborative work; and they tend to be less interested in skill-based video games like pong. Instead of the traditional computing environment in which girls are opting out, our girls opt in and crave more complex projects. Our goal is to prepare girls to start high school on equal footing with the boys, ready to join the high school coding classes.

Events to inspire and raise awareness

We also introduce girls to the basics of programming through workshops and hour-of-code events sponsored by corporations, community organizations, and other entities. These events are an exciting way to jumpstart a girl’s interest in computer programming, but the events are just the beginning! Our goal with hour-of-code events, day long hack-a-thons, and workshops is to generate interest in launching a series of events or a local club so girls can experience continued exposure to coding.