Michelle Lange, a writer and designer living in Chicago, contributes to the Inspiring Success – Creating IT Futures blog. This article recaps the world record setting event, Code Breakers, TechGirlz held on March 30th, 2019. Two world records were set in one day, with 342 girls participating in TechGirlz workshops at 18 different locations! The full article was originally published April 04, 2019 on the Creating IT Futures blog.
Check out the Code Breakers Recap page for more exciting information from the event.
Last Saturday (March 30th) was a record-setting day for TechGirlz, when hundreds of girls met up in person and online for Code Breakers and set two world records: one for the most girls coding at the same time in one location and one for the most girls coding in multiple locations.
“Oak Ridge, 21!” the team from Tennessee cheered over the livestream, projected into about 20 technology spaces across the country.
“Philadelphia, 70!” shouted the girls from Pennsylvania.
“I just heard from Colombia and they have 38 chicas!” said Amy Cliett, national director for TechGirlz, a non-profit dedicated to getting middle school girls interested in tech careers. “We’re doing it!”
In all, 342 middle school girls from Denver and to Durham and all the way to PSL Software labs in Itagu, Colombia, learned about image tags, uploading files and customizing fonts. While they worked together in person and virtually building websites using CSS and HTML, they were also creating two different world records.
“We’re always looking for more ways to get and keep girls excited about technology,” said TechGirlz CEO and founder Tracey Welson-Rossman. “We created the world record, and hope it will quickly be broken.”
More girls are joining programs like TechGirlz because they’re interested in tech, she said. They want to learn new skills with their friends, or see if tech can become a well-paying and empowering career. Events like Code Breakers get girls together for technology projects and show them how much fun it can be to create phone apps, play with binary code and build websites related to things they like.
TechGirlz has reached 15,000 girls through fun, hands-on tech workshops, and is on track to expand its reach to 20,000 girls by 2020. During Code Breakers, each group sounded off from their own location on a shared livestream — a way for them to feel connected and get them excited about working with other girls in tech, both in person and digitally, all around the world.