Ultimate Mentor Adventure for Girls in STEM

[Reprinted from Old Ain’t Dead.]

Marvel is doing something marvelous for girls who are interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) around the release of Thor: The Dark World. The program is called Ultimate Mentor Adventure. Here’s how it works.

Ultimate Mentor Adventure promo
Natalie Portman in the Ultimate Mentor Adventure promo

Natalie Portman, who plays Jane Foster, an astrophysicist, in Thor: The Dark World describes the program in a video you can see here.

  • Girls from the U.S. in grades 9 – 12 can apply. The minimum age is 14.
  • Each girl is connected to a mentor who is working in a field in which the girl is interested.
  • The girl interviews the mentor and makes a video.
  • The videos are entered in the contest.
  • The winner gets to go to the opening of Thor: The Dark World in California and see the video they made shown along with the film. The winner also gets to go behind the scenes at the movie.

A girl really cannot lose by participating in this mentor adventure. Just by participating she gets to meet a woman in a position she wants to know more about. The girls get help finding the mentors and making the videos. Everyone who participates will have a positive experience whether she wins or not.

Kudos to Marvel for this brilliant idea.

 

Intuitive – not so much – and other iOS 7 thoughts

Have you tried using the new Air Drop sharing tools in iOS 7? I have. A few points.

  1. It is so not intuitive. I had to look up directions to even get started.
  2. Even with directions I couldn’t make it work.
  3. The option I wanted – to send images from my iPad to my computer – never worked for me even though all my devices confirmed that they saw each other and were ready to receive.

In addition to that frustration with iOS 7, I want to register the complaint that the dull grey color scheme doesn’t help me find anything and the white text on a grey background is hard to read. A little color would be useful to help find the important things – everything looks alike.

I get it, Apple wanted to move away from the skeuomorphic elements in their look. The pendulum traveled a bit too far. Let’s bring it back to the middle, okay?

Pop Culture and Women in Tech

Tina Majorino and Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars
A geeky Tina Majorino with Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars

I wrote We Need More Young Geeky Female Role Models on TV on my pop culture blog, Old Ain’t Dead. I’m calling it to your attention here because I think representation in media is of supreme importance in getting more girls in the STEM career pipeline. I hope you’ll give it a read.

Skye, played by Chloe Bennet, in Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is a good example of the kind of character I’m talking about. This show just began this week. We need more like her everywhere on TV.

Do you have any ideas about how to get more young girls interested in tech careers and about getting more positive geeky girl role models on TV?

Useful links: dialog element, going green, surveillance

A Preview of the New Dialog Element comes from Treehouse. A new HTML element – that’s exciting news to me!

Did you try out the Ecograder tool that James Christie told us about yesterday? Web Teacher came out pretty high on the green scale, but there are a high number of http requests. One of the things I’m going to do to cut back on them is stop linking to photos on Fllickr as decorations in the useful links posts. Just words, folks. Hope you can live with it. After a discussion with Denise in Fads and Fashions, I had resolved to use more images, but have reconsidered that plan. The other fast way I see to reduce http requests is to get rid of the Flickr widget in the footer. I’ve had a Flickr widget on this blog for years because I personally enjoy it. I am 100% sure none of you readers care about it at all.

eyes on the street or creepy surveillance? danah boyd brings up serious questions that responsible adults need to be thinking about.

What the World Needs Now . . .

. . . is an app to give site owners a readout on their carbon footprint.

Did you read James Christie’s post Sustainable Web Design at A List Apart yesterday? Go, read it.

Everything Christie had to say speaks to my environmentalist heart. We tech lovers, we web designers, we gadget freaks – we are adding to the planet’s carbon footprint.

We can do something about it. Christie lists ways to lighten your site’s load on the environment. And that’s good. But it’s complicated for people to get a reading on their particular site – where it is now, and the measurable difference changes could make.

If there was an app that would give you a readout on a site it would be so useful. You could figure out how you’re doing and track the progress you made toward goals to reduce your site’s carbon footprint.

Somebody build this app. Please.

UPDATE:

James Christie responded to my tweet about this post with a link. Check it out.

Useful links: Bing search, Creative JS, iPad Classroom

bing cherry

Bing is touting some new search results tech that happens on it’s page zero search. Search Engline Land explains all about it.

Here’s a blog with JavaScripts, tutorials and articles that might help you. Creative JS.

The iPad Classroom is a Paper.li daily that might give you some good teaching ideas. Any Paper.li daily can be subscribed to, including the one I curate, Women in Web Education.