The Girls Create With Technology camp was a program organized by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lewis University. It was sponsored through a generous grant from the AT&T Aspire program. The goal of the grant, which was led by Dr. Cindy Kersey, was to introduce young women to Computer Science.

Computer Science is a field enriched by people with a variety of talents and backgrounds. Women have played an extremely important role in advancing the field throughout its history. The first Computer Programmer, Ada Lovelace, was a woman, as was the person credited with building the first compiler, Grace Hopper. Marissa Mayer helped Google refine its search engine and then went on to head Yahoo! Women have played and will continue to play tremendously important roles in this most dynamic of fields. The goal of this program was to help get these 22 young women to start thinking of their opportunities as Computer Scientists.

The culminating project the girls pursued was a robot they designed and built themselves. They used Hummingbird Robot Kits with the Snap programming language to animate robots they built out of arts and crafts supplies. As they worked on this project, they learned how to think like a programmer to get motors and servos and actuators to move robot limbs in response to things going on in their environment. It was a real treat to watch them work on these projects, and it was even better to see the end result.

Without further ado, here are links to movies of the robots the girls created. (Please be a little patient while they finish loading.)

Angel the Elephant

Read the creators' descriptions of Angel the Elephant:

• Faith's story
• Marissa's story

Penguin

Monkey

Tardis (Dr. Who)

Gamzee

Fish

Sponge Bob