Girls Who Code
Summer Immersion Program - Summer 2015
Overview
In the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was lucky to be admitted to the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program. That summer was my first introduction to computer science, and I spent seven weeks at Twitter in San Francisco learning computer science fundamentals like data types, variables, conditionals, functions, and more. We learned the basics of Scratch, Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery and completed various projects in each language like Jackson Pollock painting programs, city scrollers, and random haiku generators. My class had the opportunity to take field trips to Google and Facebook's headquarters, and we had tech talks with influential women and men in tech like Mark Krieger, co-founder of Instagram; Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter; and Danielle Feinberg, Director of Photography and Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar. I had an amazing summer and feel so blessed to have received so many valuable experiences through the Girls Who Code program. After that summer, I knew I wanted to pursue computer science.
Showing my class's hand symbol for the Twitter bird at our Facebook HQ field trip!
Final Project - Above Love
For my final project, I teamed up with Jessica Eng, Lauren Cueto, and Karen Vite to build an inclusive adventure side scrolling game called Above Love. We were fed up with the "damsel in distress" narrative and decided to build a game where the characters had customizable genders and races. We had non-binary and binary options and pronouns for gender, and a range of skin colors for the game's characters. The game consisted of multiple levels where the main character had to save their partner. We built the project using JavaScript and HTML, and had fun putting together the story and different levels.
Other Highlights
Selfie with Ellen's 2014 Oscar selfie painting at Twitter HQ.
In the ball pit at Google HQ!
