At 4:30 pm on Saturday, July 19, 160 teenage girls left the Rocky Mountaineer Train Station with smiles on their faces.
Speaking to the event’s host, Sandra Wear, was no easy task—she took her hosting duties seriously, ensuring that all girls walking past her knew how they were getting home, and had checked out with the volunteers. The wellbeing of women in this industry—and BC’s girls at large—is one of Wear’s chief priorities. Sandra Wear serves as the CEO of Canadian Women in Technology and the vice-chair of the Big Sisters of BC-Lower Mainland.
This sense of duty echoed through the room: more than once volunteers came to her to ensure that she knew whether or not would-be (hopefully will-be) programmers and engineers had been seen safely home. This was the closing of the inaugural ‘Be Like Ada’ event. The titular Ada, for the uninitiated, is history’s Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer. Whether or not the girls came in knowing the namesake’s history, they left with her enthusiasm.
Or rather, didn’t leave. The girls lingered as long as they could. Parents mingled with a panel of experts who had made themselves available to answer any questions the girls might’ve had about entering the industry. In one particular case, a parent was an expert. MyBestHelper and Medeo’s Dr. Alexandra Greenhill was there not only as an expert, but as the proud parent of a participant in the day’s events.
Once seated at tables, the girls were tasked to devise pairs of superhero goggles. What that meant to them was for the girls to decide. But physicality of the goggles made for a good analogy to the composition of a program. The Superhero glasses were ultimately the object, an arm length a variable, the size for arm length a conditional, and so on and so forth. Designing was followed by construction with Lego blocks to drive the point home further. Wear’s pride is contagious.
“What we did, instead of prescribing this is how you build an HTML page, we said this is how you break down a problem,” she says.
The contagion is real—volunteers and parents continuously approach. A quick aside to congratulate, thank, and praise a volunteer interrupts her flow. And then a compliment to her program has her gushing. The success of the day isn’t surprising, to attendees or to Wear. But planning the event did pose a question—how would girls get here to enjoy the event?
“My biggest concern about this event was getting girls interested to do this,” Wear explains. “We went to schools, we did lots of social media, we partnered with a ton of people. We did traditional media, and we went to organizations that would have a lot of followers. But the go-to has to be through schools. Some schools said to come back in September, and we put this together really quickly. I contacted all 72 schools in the Lower Mainland. They’re open to it, but they need more time.”
The next event is already being planned—but there’s a lot of work to be done.
“We’d like to do it annually, and we’ve been asked to do it other places in Canada, but we need to figure out how to scale it. We want there to be that in-person component, but we also want it to work online,” Wear says.
The support is there—in three months, Be Like Ada attracted sponsorship from SAP (known for its support of UBC’s GIRLsmarts) Telus, Microsoft, UBC Applied Engineering, BCIC, Clio, Allocadia, SFU Applied Sciences and BCIC. The girls came from far and wide—the age range skewed from 14-16, for the most part, but one particularly driven high school senior came all the way out from Maple Ridge.
Women have come a long way for and in this industry. Be Like Ada fills a niche in the educational system for women and coding. GIRLsmarts is for middle school girls; Ladies Learning Code is primarily for grown women. Ada Lovelace was 17 when her talents were discovered and fostered. Being like Ada has never been easier.
