Our newsletters highlight a variety of people, organizations, and resources that are doing work to broaden participation and expand equitable and engaging computer science and STEM opportunities. We are honored to work in this space along with so many talented and passionate individuals and want to help bring attention to their work.
This Week’s Spotlight and Project-Inspiration Theme: Women's History Month
Spotlight on Women’s History! This week’s focus is “Next Generation of Women History Makers”
For the next month, we will shine our spotlight on the contributions of women in history, culture and society.
This week’s focus is “Next Generation of Women History Makers”
For the last week of Women’s History Month we are honoring a young woman whose history is just beginning.
Gitanjali Rao is a 15-year-old scientist whose innovation is changing the world. She was also named TIME Magazine's first-ever kid of the year in 2020. Inspired by the Flint water crisis in 2018 Rao created a device called Tethys, to help people detect if there's lead in their drinking water. This device is both faster and more inexpensive than other methods. The design is based on carbon nanotube sensor technology and provides the results to an app on your phone. She has made many other devices mainly focused on biology, chemistry, and physics.
Rao was inspired at an early age to find a way to bring positivity and community to the places we live. She was always interested in learning about STEM and creating change. When she starts a new device she does not force the process, she creates based on how she feels and how she gets inspired. She took this process and began holding “innovation sessions” to teach others how her process works. The process is observe, brainstorm, research, build, and communicate and is paired with different lesson plans, labs, and contests. She teaches this process all across the world and has now mentored over 30,000 students.
Rao was also a Technovation Global Participant and semifinalist. She created an app called Epione, which when used with another device will help better understand how addicted a patient is to opioids. She hopes that the device is something that physicians will be able to use in the future to help monitor addictions before it's too late.
To learn more about Gitanjali check out some of her TED Talks here.
This week as you are practicing coding, can you hold your own “innovation session” to solve a problem? You could use Thunkable to build an app that solves a problem and helps your community. Be sure to share whatever you come up with!
Share Your CS to Go Projects!
How to Share: We invite CS to Go with Code Savvy participants to consider sharing your projects publicly with the Code Savvy and greater #MNCodes community via video with Flipgrid. We can’t wait to see what you create! Please be sure to follow online safety guidelines and get adult permission before sharing. You can find our Privacy Policy here.
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