17 year old girl aims to inspire future technologists

17 year old girl aims to inspire future technologists

Year 13 Chilton Saint James School student Lucy Chen wants to help promote engineering and technology among young students.

After months of organising and planning, her project which consisted of two community events “NextGen Tech” and “Tech Talks” was successfully carried out.

On Saturday 30th July, over 110 young, curious minds from all over Wellington assembled together at Chilton Saint James School for the NextGen Tech series of practical workshops. Four back-to-back sessions introduced attendees to coding, humanitarian engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence.

In the robotics workshop, the students learned how to programme micro controllers to make music and moving motors. The coding workshop was based around Scratch, a programming language that introduced them to game making. The humanitarian engineering workshop invited students to simulate countries to “buy” resources to make water filters, while the artificial intelligence (AI) workshop tied it all together with a discussion around the future AI.

“It was pleasing to see a range of students attending, including a mix of boys and girls, as well as those who had some previous knowledge of technology and those with no experience at all.” Lucy says.

She received a lot of positive feedback from parents after the event. One parent said, “My son attended the NextGen Tech day on Saturday and he loved it so much. As soon as he got home, he downloaded Scratch on his computer and has been further learning how to code since the day.”

Following on from the workshops was the first Tech Talks event, consisting of a series of short interactive presentations to help people understand how technology is evolving and its importance to society. Held in the Little Theatre beside the War Memorial Library in Lower Hutt, this public talk attracted students, teachers and parents from all around Wellington, with close to 200 attending.

The five guest speakers included: Melissa Clark-Reynolds (Tech Entrepreneur), Rob England (Director at Two Hills), Rohan Wakefield (Co-founder at Enspiral Dev Academy), Hannah Gray (Technical Group Lead at Xero), and Daniel Xu (CEO of Spark64). Each spoke on the journey they had undertaken in order to end up where they were today.

All the speakers offered valuable advice to the audience, such as the importance of adaptability and keeping an open mind when it comes to decisions around careers. They also got the audience excited about new technology and opportunities, as well as destroying some common myths around “geeks”. The common theme for the night was one of following your passions and developing the ability to learn and adapt as the world continues to change around us at an unprecedented rate.

Organiser Lucy Chen was inspired to organise the day after attending the Rotary National Science and Technology Forum over the 2015-2016 summer break.

“Before the forum, I had associated engineering with fixing cars and hands-on factory work, which did not appeal to me at all.” Lucy says. The robotics module, as well as several inspiring speakers, made her realise that engineering is all about combining practical, creative and intellectual skills to solve problems that can make a difference in the world.

It was later found that many people still hold these misconceptions, therefore her project of combating those stereotypes particularly among intermediate and highschool students was the main focus. Lucy says people are responding well to the message that technology is broader than the general perception.

The day of tech was proudly supported by Chilton Saint James School, Callaghan Innovation, FutureInTech, Engineering Without Borders, Victoria University of Wellington, Hutt City Council, Rotary, Weltec, Hutt City Libraries and Technology Valley.

© Scoop Media