“It is with great appreciation that the Amador Valley Girls Who Code Club acknowledges Parallax for the Boe-Bots and cyber:bots. Thank you for your support and the help you have given to inspire the next generation of female Computer Scientists and STEM revolutionaries.
Kevin Kiyoi
Amador Valley High School
Girls Who Code Advisor
On March 11th, 2023, the Amador Girls Who Code Club held our fourth annual Summit here at Amador Valley High School. Every year, we hold a Summit at Amador as a full-day event teaching young girls and nonbinary students how to program. This year, we chose a space exploration theme, leading students through an escape room by building Boe-bots and Cyber:bots: programmable robots on wheels. We had over 200 students attend our Summit this year, ranging from third to eighth graders, and over 50 high school and adult mentors to help the students.
In partnership with Parallax, we provided a Boe-bot or Cyber:bot for each small group of students and helped them work collaboratively to solve problems and work their way through each step of the escape room. We organized students into a beginner, intermediate, and advanced group with different curriculums based on difficulty and experience level. We incorporated features of the robots into each curriculum, making students write lines of code that made the robot turn, travel in all directions, and use its LED light to flash different patterns. Students were able to get hands-on and involved, building Boe-bots and Cyber:bots part by part and programming the robot to complete different tasks. On top of gaining coding insight, they learned how to work in teams to complete different challenges. Our mentors underwent intensive training sessions to learn our original curriculum and guide classrooms of students through the day. One high school mentor, Ella Jeon, said that “it’s a really fulfilling experience to be able to pass on the knowledge we’ve gained and worked together to develop.”
Our Summit started with checking-in our students, high school mentors, and adult mentors early in the morning. Registration led straight into our opening ceremony, where we had a guest speaker, Kalie Ching from UC Berkeley, speak about her experiences as a programmer and her past projects, including NASA Ames Research Center’s Astrobee. The students then headed to their respective classrooms for introductions, bonding activities, and other engaging games to kick the day off with our high school and adult mentors. They soon began building their robots, as each group of students was provided with a set of pre-organized parts, and mentor teams guided their room through each step of assembly. We held an hour-long lunch break for the students and returned to the classrooms to start coding the robots. Our mentors walked their students through a step-by-step introduction to programming in robot-specific languages. With their newfound skills, the students were able to jump into an escape room challenge where they wrote programs for their robots to complete different tasks and earned a prize. After the students wrapped up their escape rooms, we held a parent showcase that highlighted our students’ work, demonstrating the robots they constructed. We finished our event with a closing ceremony, presenting awards to students and thanking our partners, attendees, and helpers for all their work coordinating such a large-scale event.
