Robo-dog vs Robo-unicorn, who will win?!
We hope that January was a month of rest and rejuvenation for you and your family. For all our friends here in Melbourne and elsewhere, we hope lockdown is going without too much stress, and that it will not last much longer.
As parents, this year we have entered the years of following the “school holidays” flock. This means that we now have early school year kids who will require (a lot of) our attention during school holidays. And to keep them entertained, one of the things that we did was to take our girls to Girl Geek Academy of course!
So off we went to the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre in Melbourne with our laptops, iPads, and drink bottles, and attended the #MissMakesCode workshop. This program is held during school holidays and was created to build confidence and self-efficacy in algorithmic thinking, programming, and coding for young girls aged 5-8 years. The workshop started first coding concepts. Our girls were on the younger end of the age spectrum so Sarah Moran (CEO of Girl Geel Academy) adjusted the activities to match and engage our girls. Thank you Sarah! By mid morning, a session of yoga was in place for the girls to stretch their little limbs whilst the parents went to the kitchen for a cuppa. After our little break, a combination of online and offline activities were taught including key coding concepts so the girls could customise their own game using code blocks. At the end of the session, the girls got to play with robotics, and gave robo-dog and robo-unicorn instructions on how to go for a walk, do a wee, roll over, and dance. We finished off the morning workshop with a delicious session of dumplings at Hutong Dumplings 😋 Winning!
As some of you may already know, we are passionate about women in the tech industry so if you want to talk or learn more about this topic, please email us at gday@blackmill.co. Furthermore, if you wish to introduce your little one to coding, please check out code.org for their pre-school introduction to coding for pre-reading kids.
