Skool is an independent Hungarian nonprofit initiative dedicated to educate, inspire and motivate girls in the field of technology. Skool’s mission is to contribute to a social change: to close the gender gap by having more women technology creators. With its fun, engaging and student-centered activities, workshops, after-school courses, summer camps and soft-skill trainings, Skool equips girls between the age of 10-18 with the skills and resources required to explore their options and career possibilities in technology.

Skool is bringing tried-and-tested, successful and innovative ways and methods to the project on teaching and inspiring the young to be more attracted to technology careers. Skool places a strong emphasis on industry engagement to connect the young to the real life work challenges and opportunities. Skool has worked with over 20 technology partners in Hungary, including Microsoft, Prezi, Google, Facebook, as well as 180 volunteers who are mainly tech developers and thus role models for the girls.

Skool’s sister company, KódGarázs runs 10 week courses which offer both boys and girls the opportunity to learn more about programming in a similar fun and child-focused way.

Key person involved in the project:

Zsófi Major is the Founder of Skool and is responsible amongst others for international projects and partnerships. Zsófi has a strong experience working with international and multi-disciplinary projects, ensuring coordinated and integrated working processes across countries and multi-functional programmes. Zsófi has been involved in several events, roundtables and presentations in Hungary about educating and empowering young girls towards technology.

Situated in south west London, the University of Roehampton has been involved in teacher education since 1841. Its School of Education has an international reputation in education research and is one of the leading teacher training providers in England. The computing education team has a made significant contributions to the technology enhanced learning, curriculum development in computing and ICT, and teaching resources and professional development for computing.

Key team members:

Miles Berry, principal lecturer in computing education. Miles was part of the team developing the computing programmes of study for England’s national curriculum and has also been involved in international curriculum development projects. He has led or consulted on a number of the implementation projects for the English computing curriculum, including an award winning commercial scheme of work and the BCS’s Barefoot Computing project.

Peter Kemp, senior lecturer in computing education. Pete leads Roehampton’s initial teacher training for secondary computing. He too was part of the drafting team for the English computing curriculum and has contributed to international curriculum development. He leads a digital animation summer school, supported by grants from Google and Next Gen Skills.

The Department of Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering (DIEEI) primary activities are research and education. DIEEI's scientific research covers several fields of ICT, industrial and information engineering, including Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Distributed computing, Telecommunication Networks, Industrial Informatics, Electronics, Control, Robotics and Bioengineering. DIEEI has several laboratories with state of the art equipment and has been involved since the 70s in several research projects at the European and National level. It has been instrumental for the development of the technological district known as Etna Valley that currently aggregates over 150 companies operating in the field of advanced information and communication technology. DIEEI staff comprises 56 academics and numerous post-doc fellows. The main R&D areas of the team involved in the project, coordinated by Prof. Daniela Giordano, are within the fields of Learning technology, Bio-medical informatics, Intelligent systems, Human-computer interaction.

Key person involved in the project:

Prof. Daniela Giordano (female) is professor of Cognitive systems and Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Catania, where she is the Director of the MS programme in Computer Engineering. She holds a Phd in Educational Technology from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (1998), and a Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering. She started her scientific activity in temporal logics to simulate interactive systems and in multimedia technologies for training. Her doctoral studies provided the foundations for developing an original perspective, based on considering learning and cognition as distributed, social and situated processes which has pointed out the limitations of some traditional methodological approaches to information systems analysis and design, software engineering and knowledge-based systems development. Once back in Italy, her lines of research have developed around the various collaborations that she has established with several national and international institutions and around the participation to a number of European, national and regional projects, ranging in the fields of advanced e-learning systems based on multimodal interaction, biomedical informatics, big data analysis and knowledge extraction from heterogeneous data. Her scientific collaborations (most notably within the Dentistry and the Neurosciences domains) have originated highly interdisciplinary research and have provided a fruitful opportunity to intertwine the study of the human learning/cognitive system with the study of artificial learning/cognitive systems (such as the computer vision ones) to solve concrete problems. This activity has resulted in more than 150 scientific publications on international journals with high impact factor, on specialized book series and on proceedings of international conferences.

Francesco Maiorana has more than twenty years of teaching experience, including tutoring and teaching high school, undergraduate and post-graduate courses, teacher preparation courses as well as volunteer mentorship in informal education (www.coderdojo.com). He is an active researcher in computer science education, medical informatics and data mining, with more than ten years of experience and more than 50 manuscripts published in peer reviewed international journals and conferences. He was an active researcher in the European projects ITRACE (http://www.itrace.ing.unict.it/) and mEducator (http://www.meducator.net/), as well as national projects. Currently he is the principal investigator in the project related to the Google grant CS4HS (http://www.cs4hs.com/). He is one of the leader of the 5th working group at the ITICSE conference (http://www.iticse2015.mii.vu.lt/en/menu1/presenters/working-groups/)

VHTO aims to increase the participation of girls and women in science, engineering and technology (STEM) in the Netherlands. VHTO initiates and executes a wide range of projects and activities, from primary education through the labour market. VHTO activities are based on results of national and international research. Research has shown that it is not due to a lack of ability that girls opt out for STEM/ICT, but lack of role models, lack of support from teachers and parents and simply not being well informed about future education or job opportunities in STEM and computer sciences.

Female STEM professionals and students play an important role in boosting the involvement of girls and women in STEM. As role models they can show the broad range of STEM-study programs and professions, demonstrate that they enjoy their work and that it fits their aspirations and attainment. They support the growth of girls’ self-confidence and interest in STEM-related subjects. The support of female professionals as role models is integrated in many of VHTO’s activities. The women who participate signed up for the role-model data base Spiegelbeeld (“Mirror Image”) in which more than 2000 female STEM professionals and students participate.

Key persons involved in the project:

Cornelia Booij (MA) is the managing director of VHTO. Over the years mrs. Booij has been a member of various governmental and EU expertgroups, advisory panels and committee’s on the subject of girls and women in STEM and computer sciences (IT). She has given many speeches and teacher-training programmes on this subject for different audiences, nationally and internationally.

Esther van Schaik has a degree in educational sciences and is policy advisor of VHTO and coordinates the European funded projects. She is skilled in working on a variety of EU projects, reporting to a variety of funding bodies. In addition Esther is the contact person of VHTO for two European networks: The European Association for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (http://www.witec-eu.net/) and The European Centre for Women and Technology (http://www.womenandtechnology.eu)