Over 100 High School Girls Explore Computer Science at Girls Encoded

Over 100 high school girls and their parents attended Girls Encoded, an exciting all-day event designed to educate and encourage girls to study computer science. The event, which took place on November 8th, was run under the coordination of students Allison McDonald, Ariana Mirian, Lauren Molley, and CSE Prof. Rada Mihalcea.

The day was filled with hands-on activities, guest speakers, panel discussions, and projects made by current U of M students. The guest speakers were CSE Prof. Emily Mower Provost, Dr. Pramita Mitra from Ford, and Cassie Byrd. The students did several activities using Lego Mindstorms, Game Maker, and pen and paper activities that illustrated challenges and algorithms in computer security and computational linguistics.

Both students and parents had the chance to tour several of our labs, including the Intelligent Robotics Lab, the Security and Privacy Lab, the Embedded Systems Lab, the Mobile Interaction and Music Performance Lab, the Language and Information Technologies Lab, and the Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval Lab.

The day was a perfect opportunity for the girls to learn more about the exciting things computer science has to offer!