16/17 Activities

Cisco - Girls Power Tech

Working with Cisco female employees, professional networking and lessons learned were shared. Interactive activities in the creation, collaboration space using compute power were conducted. Presentations on participant designs of their Internet of Things were given.

Cluster Thons

Several sessions to socialize and advocate on PV's Cluster Crush (cluster.pvschools.net) initiative were held. The advocacy is working! In just one year, PV has had thousands of computers simulating protein folds, and provided the data back to Pande Labs at Stanford University. PV has gone from a global team rank of 230,000th place, to now approaching breaking the top 400 mark.

PV students advocated through teacher training on ideas to use in the classroom and media centers, and at PTO and school events. Families, schools, classrooms, grandparents and grandchildren all used their information technology know how to aid computational medical research in finding cures for diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, AID's, etc..

The NPR ran a podcast and blog story on Cluster Crush. PV students were selected to present at a Google conference, and will be presenting at a 17/18 conference of Arizona IT Directors. Stanford University invited student representatives out to visit Pande Labs.

Executive Women's Forum

Approximately 60 women from the Executive Women's Forum visited eight PV schools and their classrooms, along with a community event, all to conduct lessons and discuss security in the digital age. The professionals come from the Information Security, Risk Management and Privacy industries. The sessions were sponsored by WIT as an integration with PV's Digital Citizen Initiative.

Code a Thon's

Spring and Fall Code a Thon's brought hundreds of participants from across PV. Parents, community members, students , teachers and IT staff all contributed.

ASU Outreach

Increasing the understanding and awareness of Advanced Research was the focus of this ASU/PV outreach. Female students from PV high schools, coded on High Performance Computing clusters, explored visual analytics at the Decision Theater, toured the ASU Data Center, became aware of materials sciences through accelerometers and electron microscopy, while being hosted by graduate research students in Engineering and Sustainability colleges.

Create a Thons

Several Create a Thons occurred throughout the year. Activities in coding, electronics, computer science, digital music and fine arts.

Real Life Stories

The debut of Real Life Stories by professional women on how information technology has impacted their life's, was held in 16/17. Women Who Code, UofA Medical student, IT department employee, Google employee, PV teacher and student Robot Champion all expressed powerful stories around themes of endurance, passion, inspiration, etc..

Cisco Corporate & Stanford University, California Trip

Female representatives from each PV high school were invited by Stanford University and Cisco to travel to Palo Alto, California.

At Stanford University students were hosted by the Pande Labs (aka, Protein Folding@Home), as part of PV's own Cluster Crush participation. Students met researchers at the Computer Science department, where discussions on why CS is now the #1 major of females at Stanford University. The Stanford Sustainability Farm provided fresh air, and a look at the biologic and environmental factors involved in order to sustain.

Cisco Corporate hosted the high school students to an Executive Briefing, heard from corporate female leadership and engineers, and experienced technologies from; virtual reality, to remote collaboration, to global security, and operations in extreme climates.

All photos from the trip.

Immigrant/Refugee Sponsorship

Immigrant/refugee PV students, with limited English-speech, were provided multiple days of information technology experiences by the IT Department. Coding, robots and create spaces were developed with the female students during the 16-17 school year.

These students are part of an initiative by the Language Acquisition department. The IT Department is now sponsoring the female students through their high school years to make sure these students are aware of the opportunities that await them in IT.

Careers and Scholarships

Multiple meetings were held with PV's Counselors wherein the WIT program was presented, and information provided on the IT opportunities for our female high school students. The Counselors for Computing (C4C), program was targeted moving forward for Counselors and PV's College and Career Centers.

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