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”
Even though Women’s History Month has come to a close for this year, we wanted to shine another spotlight on another young history maker.
Dasia Taylor is a high school student from Iowa whose love for science has led to inventions with the power to help others. Dasia became interested in competing in state-wide science competitions, and her work began to focus on solving the problem of infection in surgical wounds. She learned about “smart sutures” that were conductive and could communicate with smart phones to indicate when an infection is present, but wondered about people living in less developed countries where smart phone and internet access is less prevalent. Her research led to a breakthrough innovation based on a common vegetable: the beet.
Through her work, Dasia found that beets are natural indicators, and change color at the perfect PH level to indicate when an infection is present in a wound. This helped her to create sutures dyed with beet extract that will change color to indicate the presence of infection without the need for technology and the internet. Her sutures have the potential to save many lives, as the World Health Association estimates the infection rate for surgical wounds in less developed countries is around 11%. Her work has also earned her a spot as a top 40 finalist for the Regeneron Science Talent Search, a nation-wide science and math competition for high school students.
You can read more about Dasia’s research and work here, or watch a brief video of her explaining her project here.
What problems are you able to solve with your design thinking and coding skills. Identify a problem, brainstorm solutions, then start to try one out! Could you use a micro:bit to build a working prototype of your idea? Or build a simulation of it in Scratch to show how it would work. 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.