Oak Ridge Computer Science Girls

    It's 1 PM on a Monday afternoon. 13 elementary school girls are waiting patiently for the camp to start. The excitement and anticipation can be felt through the Zoom screen as I start to talk... "Hi, my name's Katie! Welcome to the first ever ORCSGirls Jr. Virtual Reality Camp! Let's get started."      Last summer (2022), I had the idea to run a coding camp for young girls through ORCSGirls. Regular ORCSGirls classes are only open to girls in 5th through 10th grade, and as a middle schooler, I wanted 2nd-4th grade girls to have a chance to explore computer science too. The goal of ORCSGirls is to inspire young girls to pursue careers in technology, and giving them that spark as early as 2nd grade is an awesome opportunity.      A lot of planning went into making this camp possible. I started with an interest survey, which is how I chose virtual reality as the topic for the camp. Then I spent months gathering a team of counselors, making forms,...

 In July 2022, ORCSGirls ran the Environment Monitoring Camp for the second time. At the camp, the girls learned how to take environmental readings through a device called the  ESP32-S2 TFT Feather . Using  Adafruit ’s technology, they programmed a working sensor that they could access through their computers. They used Adafruit’s  IO program  to create unique ways to display their data. They also made an app on  code.org  using an API from Adafruit. Two of the counselors, Katie and Kristen, are experienced with environmental technology. After participating in the camp, they expanded their knowledge to create a  ProjectCSGirls  entry. Now they’ve written about their experiences to share here. Katie shares her experience… “When I took the Enviro Monitoring Camp last summer, I learned so much about sensors and the environment. Afterwards, I kept exploring technology and took more environment monitoring classes. Eventually Kristen and I paired u...