The “Build-A-Baymax” Workshop INTRODUCES GIRLS AGES 11-18 TO TECHNOLOGY

PORTLAND, Ore. - Oct. 27, 2015 - PRLog -- “Build-A-Baymax“ workshop is inspiring young women to pursue technology by teaching 25 young girls computing concepts with fun, interactive activities through NCWIT AspireIT – a technology outreach program for K-12 girls, supported by Intel, Northrop Grumman, and Google.

Build-A-Baymax is a program which will teach  young girls to make Baymax, everyone’s favorite robot, come to life. All students will be supplied with kits containing Raspberry PIs and accessories necessary for the project. During the program, participants will learn how to make a Baymax who can detect faces and has voice recognition capabilities using Raspberry Pi, which is a credit card-sized computer. This project will teach students coding skills in PHP, Linux, and Python, as well as showing them how to apply these skills.

Guest speakers from the industry will come and talk to the students giving them a chance to see how their new skills can be applied outside of the workshop as well. Anna Nixon, an NCWIT Aspirations in Computing award recipient and a former Stoller student, will lead the after school program at Stoller Middle School, which she designed in partnership with STEM4Girls, a local non-profit dedicated to helping girls find their place in STEM fields and Qorvo, a leading provider of core technologies and RF solutions for mobile, infrastructure and aerospace/defense applications .

Recent data show that girls comprise 56% of all Advanced Placement (AP) test-takers and 47% of all AP Calculus test-takers, but only 20% of all AP CS test-takers. At the college level, women earn just 18% of all computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees. The “near-peer” approach of enlisting high school or college students to teach younger peers can be an effective way to encourage girls to consider a field they might not have otherwise pursued.

“The more chances you get to experience the wonderful things you can do in this era using just a computer the more likely you’ll grow up and join tech businesses” said Anna Nixon, currently a sophomore at Westview High school

“Technology is an integral part of life—it’s all around you. We’re excited to support the programs STEM4Girls is fostering, so that girls can not only use technology, but learn how to develop their own solutions that may one day change the world,” said Brandi Frye, Vice President of Marketing at Qorvo.

“Build-A-Baymax” workshop is one of the 28 programs nationwide to occur in NCWIT AspireIT Round 4 (October 2015 through June 2016), an initiative of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). To date, NCWIT has gifted more than $400,000 to 140 programs, providing an estimated 150,000 instruction hours to nearly 4,000 girls in 30 states since 2013. AspireIT aims to engage more than 10,000 girls by 2018.

Find out more by visiting stem4girls.org/aspireit

NCWIT AspireIT is a component of NCWIT Aspirations in Computing (AiC), a sweeping national talent development initiative for young women in computing, from kindergarten through graduate school. AiC is supported nationally by Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Bloomberg, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions Foundation, Northrop Grumman, and the Symantec Corporation. www.aspirations.org

STEM4Girls aims to instill a love for STEM in girls everywhere. Women are vastly underrepresented in STEM fields and this can only be changed by changing the attitudes young girls have towards STEM. www.stem4girls.org

Qorvo  is a leading provider of core technologies and RF solutions for mobile, infrastructure and aerospace/defense applications. Qorvo was formed following the merger of RFMD and TriQuint. For the industry's leading core RF solutions, visit www.qorvo.com