Lynn Oseguera, Intern Reporter for The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, caught up with Trevor Gardner, a Carver High School of Engineering & Science freshman. They discussed her love for the coursework in the 20+ TechShopz she participated in before becoming an advocate herself. The full article was originally published on January 20, 2020, on The Notebook.
Learning to code can seem daunting to young teens, but Carver High School of Engineering & Science freshman Trevor Gardner offers this advice: “Go for it. Even though it seems intimidating, it isn’t. And you could find a passion.”
In December 2017, Gardner attended her first program with TechGirlz, a nationwide nonprofit that provides free workshops called “TechShopz” to middle school girls, with the goal of inspiring them to pursue futures in technology.
“It was kind of an easy start to programming and made me feel like maybe I could do this,” recalled Gardner, who was then a student at Cedar Grove Christian Academy.
Gardner, 14, has completed more than 20 TechShopz since then and recently was appointed to the 11-member TechGirlz Northern Teen Advisory Board.
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Gardner discovered TechGirlz after attending the Pennsylvania Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement summer program hosted at Temple University.
“I’d heard about technology getting more popular, and it sounded like something I might want to do in college,” she said. “I hadn’t had any computer classes or coding classes or anything, so it really opened me up to it.”
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Wanting to pursue her newfound interest in technology further, she came across the TechGirlz website. The first one-day workshop she completed focused on the coding language Python.
