Tag Archives: Elizabeth Segran

Model-type coding

By model, I mean Karlie Kloss whose computer coding camp project was profiled in an August 31, 2017 article by Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

It all started on a whim. Four years ago, supermodel Karlie Kloss decided to take an intensive coding course at New York Flatiron School. She had never written a lick of code in her life, but she wanted to see what the fuss about coding was all about. Between runway shows in Paris and Milan, and magazine shoots in London and New York, she would sit down with her instructor, Avi Flombaum, and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails.

“It was sheer curiosity that led me to take that class,” the 25-year-old Kloss tells Fast Company. “But it was really eye-opening to learn about the hardware and the software that goes into the tech we use every day.”

As a successful model, Kloss didn’t have any immediate reason to learn how to code, but she soon realized the activity could bring sweet rewards–literally. “One of the first things I learned how to program was a drone that could pick up a cookie on one side of the room and deliver it to the other side of the room,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do with code.”

Around 2012, coding bootcamps like the Flatiron course began popping up all over the country with the promise of equipping people with no prior training with the basics of computer science. In Kloss’s case, she was surprised to discover that coding wasn’t an impenetrable skill. “It’s a language just like any other language,” she says. “And the way our world is going, learning to code should be just as important as learning your mother tongue.”

There’s a persistent narrative in our culture that women are less inclined to pursue computer science. This was evident in the infamous Google memo, in which an employee, James Damore, claimed that women are genetically less inclined to code. This hasn’t been Kloss’s experience, though. She’s encountered many young women who are just as curious as she is about the technology that surrounds them. “They are aware of the power of these technical skills and how they are shaping the world today,” Kloss says. “These young women grew up with this technology embedded and they’re not scared to try building things. They are more forward-thinking than we sometimes give them credit for.”

Back in 2014, Kloss put out a call on her social media channels, asking if there were like-minded young women out there who wanted to code but didn’t have access to a course. She received an avalanche of responses from young women and ultimately offered scholarships to 21 young women to attend a two-week summer camp at the Flatiron School.

Three years later, Kloss says that this initiative–called Kode With Klossy–has grown and evolved. So far, more than 400 girls age 13 to 18 have gone through the Kode With Klossy summer camps. Kloss can now track where these students have ended up, and the results have been impressive. One of the original beneficiaries just won the grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, together with three other high school girls. (The team beat out 750 engineers with a virtual reality app that can help treat and diagnose ADHD efficiently.) …

There’s a bit more about Kloss and her camps, although it’s mostly about Kloss’s career, in a June 2017 article by Laura Brown for In Style magazine.

You can find Kode with Klossy here; the efforts are concentrated in the US. For anyone interested in coding initiatives in Canada, there’s Ladies learning Code, which offers both girls only and co-ed opportunities amongst others. Also, the Canadian federal government is getting in on the act with a $50M programme as I noted in my June 16, 2017 posting,

Government officials are calling the new $50M programme to teach computer coding skills to approximately 500,000 Canadian children from kindergarten to grade 12, CanCode (h/t June 14, 2017 news item on phys.org). Here’s more from the June 14, 2017 Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada news release,,

Young Canadians will get the skills they need for the well-paying jobs of the future as a result of a $50-million program that gives them the opportunity to learn coding and other digital skills.

The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, together with the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, today launched CanCode, a new program that, over the next two years, will give 500,000 students from kindergarten to grade 12 the opportunity to learn the in-demand skills that will prepare them for future jobs.

The program also aims to encourage more young women, Indigenous Canadians and other under-represented groups to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. In addition, it will equip 500 teachers across the country with the training and tools to teach digital skills and coding.

 Getting back to Segran’s article about Kloss’s coding camps, the writer describes the current approach to coding camps in the US,

The problem, she [Kloss] believes, is access. Many middle and high schools don’t offer coding courses, although this is slowly changing. And when they are offered, they tend to be oversubscribed by male students, creating an uncomfortable imbalance in the classroom. Then there are the popular coding bootcamps, such as the one that Kloss took, but they often come with hefty price tags: Tuition can cost upward of $1,000 a week. There have also been questions about how sustainable the coding bootcamp business model really is, since several companies, like The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp, have had to shut down recently.

I guess we’ll see what happens with the Canadian $50M in the next few years and whether it proves a more effective approach (i.e., government and not-for-profit) than the individual business and not-for-profit efforts seen in the US.

Ministry’s new women’s shirt: a technical marvel

It seems there’s another entry into the textile business, a women’s dress shirt made of a technical textile. A Sept. 13, 2016 article by Elizabeth Segran for Fast Company describes this ‘miracle’ piece of apparel,

There are few items of clothing professional women love more than a well-draped silk shirt. They’re the equivalent of men’s well-tailored Oxford shirts: classic, elegant, and versatile enough to look appropriate in almost any business context. But they’re also difficult to maintain: Silk wrinkles easily, doesn’t absorb perspiration, and needs to be dry cleaned.

Boston-based fashion brand Ministry (formerly Ministry of Supply) has heard our lament. …

Ministry gathered …  feedback and spent two years creating a high-performance women’s work shirt as part of its debut womenswear collection, launching today [Sept. 13, 2016]. Until now, the five-year-old company has been focused on creating menswear made with cutting-edge new textiles, but cofounder Gihan Amarasiriwardena explains that when they were developing the womenswear collection, they didn’t just remake their men’s garments in women’s sizes.

Here’s an image of the shirt in black,

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

[downloaded from http://ministry.co/collections/womens]

Segran’s article mostly extolls its benefits but there is a little technical information,

Their brand-new, aptly named Easier Than Silk Shirt looks and feels like silk, but is actually made from a Japanese technical fabric (i.e., a textile engineered to perform functions, like protecting the wearer from extremely high temperatures). It drapes nicely, wicks moisture, is wrinkle-resistant, and can be thrown in a regular washer and dryer. I tested the shirt on a typical Monday. This meant getting dressed at 7 a.m., taking my baby to a health checkup—where she proceeded to drool on me—wiping myself off for a lunch interview, then heading to a coffee shop to write for several hours before going to a book launch party. By the time I got home that evening and looked in the mirror, the shirt was somehow crease-free and there were no moisture blotches in sight.

When Ministry claims to “engineer a shirt,” it does not mean this in a metaphorical sense. The by [sic] three MIT students, Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, and Kit Hickey; the former two were trained as engineers. Every aspect of Ministry’s design process incorporates scientific thinking, from introducing NASA temperature-regulating textile technology into dress shirts to using equipment to test each garment before it hits the market. The Ministry headquarters in Boston is full of machines, including one that pulls at fabric to see how well it is able to recover from being stretched, and computer systems that offer 3D modeling of the human form.

I wonder if Teijin (first mentioned here in a July 19, 2010 posting about their now defunct ‘morphotex’ [based on the nanostructures on a Morpho butterfly’s wing] fabric) is the Japanese company producing Ministry’s technical textile. Ministry’s company website is less focused on the technology than on the retail aspect of their business so if the technical information is there, it’s not immediately obvious.

NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), one of the world’s largest hackathons, and women

Elizabeth Segran’s April 19, 2016 article for Fast Company profiles some work being done at NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to encourage more women to participate in their hackathons (Note: A link has been removed),

For the past four years, NASA has hosted the Space Apps Challenge, one of the biggest hackathons on the planet. Last year, 14,264 people gathered in 133 locations for 48 to 72 hours to create apps using NASA’s data. A team in Lome, Togo, built a clean water mapping app; one in Bangalore, India, created a desktop planetarium; another in Pasadena, California, created a pocket assistant for astronauts. This year’s hackathon happens this upcoming weekend [April 22 – 24, 2016].

While NASA has been able to attract participants from all corners of the globe, it has consistently struggled to get women involved. NASA is working very hard to change this. “The attendance is generally 80% male,” says Beth Beck, NASA’s open innovation project manager, who runs the Space Apps Hackathon. “It’s more everyman than everywoman.”

There is a mention of a 2015 Canadian hackathon and an observation Beth Beck made at the time (from the Segran article),

Beck noticed that female participation in hackathons seemed to drop after the middle school years. At last year’s hackathon in Toronto, for instance, there were two sections: one for students and one for adults. Girls made up at least half of the student participants. “The middle school girls looked like honey bees, running around in little packs to learn about the technology,” she says. “But in the main hacking area, it was all guys. I wanted to know what happens that makes them lose their curiosity and enthusiasm.”

Beck’s further observations led to these conclusions,

It turns out that women are not significantly more interested in certain subjects than others. What they cared about most was being able to explore these topics in a space that felt friendly and supportive. “They are looking for signals that they will be in a safe space where they feel like they belong,” Beck says. Often, these signals are very straightforward: they seek out pictures of women on the event’s webpage and look for women’s names on the speaker panels and planning committees. …

Another interesting thing that Beck discovered is that women who are brave enough to attend these events want to go a day early to get the lay of the land and perhaps form a team in advance. They want to become more comfortable with the physical space where the hackathon will take place and learn as much as possible about the topics. “When the hackathon then becomes flooded with men, they feel ready for it,” she says.

While men described hacking as something that they did in their spare time, the research showed that many women often had many other family responsibilities and couldn’t just attend a hackathon for fun. And this wasn’t just true in developing countries, where girls were often tasked with childcare and chores, while boys could focus on science. In the U.S., events where there was childcare provided were much more highly attended by women than those that did not have that option. …

NASA’s hackathons are open to people with diverse skill sets—not just people who know code. Beck has found that men are more likely to participate because they are interested in space; they simply show up with ideas. Women, on the other hand, need to feel like they have the appropriate battery of skills to contribute. With this knowledge, Beck has found it helpful to make it clear that each team needs strong storytellers who can explain the value of the app. …

The folks at NASA are still working at implementing these ideas and Segran’s article describes the initiatives and includes this story (Note: A link has been removed),

Last year [2015], for instance, two female students in Cairo noticed that the hackathon has specifically called out to women and they wanted to host a local chapter of the hackathon. Their professor, however, told them that women could not host the event. The women reached out to NASA themselves and Beck wrote to them personally, saying that she highly encouraged them to create their own event. That Cairo event ended up being the largest Space Apps hackathon in the world, with 700 participants and a wait list of 300. …

Kudos to Beth Beck, NASA, and those two women in Cairo.

For anyone (male/female) interested in the 2016 hackathon, it’s being held this weekend (April 22 – 24, 2016), from the NASA Space Apps Challenge homepage,

For 48-72 hours across the world, problem solvers like you join us for NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge, one of the largest hackathons in the universe. Empowered by open data, you collaborate with strangers, colleagues, friends, and family to solve perplexing challenges in new and unexpected ways — from designing an interactive space glove to natural language processing to clean water mapping. Join us on our open data mission, and show us how you innovate.

Not Just For Coders

Beginners, students, experts, engineers, makers, artists, storytellers — Space Apps is for you! We welcome all passionate problem solvers to join our community of innovators. Citizens like you have already created thousands of open-source solutions together through code, data visualizations, hardware and design. How will you make your global impact?

It’s too late to become a host for the hackathon but you may be able to find a location for one somewhere near you on the hackathon website’s Locations page. There are three locations in Canada for the 2016 edition: Toronto (waitlist), Winnipeg (still open), and Waterloo (waitlist).