Today is International Women’s Day — a global day to highlight and promote the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women! Our favourite way to celebrate the day is to shine a light on a few of the amazing girls and young women in the global Coolest Projects community.
On this International Women’s Day, you get to hear from Zoe, Clara, and Parisa, who all love digital making and solving problems using technology. Whether it’s designing a fun game, an helpful app, or a project to support their community – these young tech creators are proving that the sky’s the limit!
Zoe, based in Ireland, took part in the Coolest Projects online showcase in 2020 with her Scratch project, Find It.
Tell us about your project
“My project is called Find It. You have to find hidden objects in each level, then you get points for each time you collect something. In the end, if you have all of the points you need, you get coins.”
What did you learn whilst creating your project?
“I learned a lot while making my project and how to fix problems along the way. I was also able to view other people’s projects and they were all really good.”
Tell us about your experience of taking part in Coolest Projects online showcase!
“It was fun and exciting. But it was also a challenge and I was nervous. It made me feel happy that I could take part. I felt proud when I was finished and found out that Tim Peake had picked my project as one of his favourites.”
Clara took part in the Coolest Projects USA event in 2020 with her group project, Teachers’ Pet.
What inspired your project?
“We went into Coolest Projects knowing that we wanted to create something that would benefit our school community. […]
Teachers struggle with getting affordable supplies in a timely manner, which greatly impacts the quality of learning in the classroom.
To combat these pain points, our team designed Teachers’ Pet, an app that provides teachers and school administrators a collaborative platform to order supplies efficiently and effectively.
By streamlining the ordering process with a simple ordering system, order status dashboard, and in-app teacher-admin messaging system, we hope to improve teachers’ lives so they can provide us, students, a better learning experience.”
What advice would you have for girls who are thinking about taking part in Coolest Projects?
“You won’t know what it’s like unless you try it! I went into Coolest Projects not knowing what to expect at all. I was blown away by the sheer range of project ideas in the exhibition hall, as well as others’ creativity! Many projects had coding languages, microcontrollers, Raspberry Pis, etc. in common, but each and every project was so unique! It’s incredible. Even now, almost a year later, our Girls Who Code club still remembers Coolest Projects like it was yesterday — it’s one of our fondest memories!”
Parisa is a previous Coolest Projects participant and has also acted as judge at Coolest Projects USA
What was your project, and why was it important to you?
“My project was a wristband that was designed to monitor a firefighter’s health and their surrounding area using a temperature sensor, a gas sensor, a heart rate sensor, and a motion sensor. I live in Southern California, where we get a lot of fires, and the year I came up with my idea was a really bad year for California. Seeing firefighters everywhere almost every day brought them to the forefront of my mind.”
Could you describe your experience as a judge for Coolest Projects USA?
“Judging at Coolest Projects was my first time experiencing being a judge for a competition, and it exceeded all my expectations.
My favorite part of judging was being able to see so many cool projects that I wouldn’t have otherwise. When I was a [participant] and looking at other projects, I usually only caught the tail end or part of the project, and I was too nervous to go up and ask them to repeat [their whole presentation] again. As a judge, I got to hear the entire story of how a project had come to life.”
A big thank you to our three awesome contributors, Zoe, Clara, and Parisa! If they have inspired you about Coolest Projects, you can register to take part today.