 Hi everybody, my name is Lucy DeLabrier and I'd like to invite you to join me in a passion project that I've been involved with for almost 20 years, increasing the percentage of women and girls that are involved in technology-rich projects, courses, and careers. A few months ago, I adopted Emma, this mobile studio for creating and making, to help me reach that goal. Those of you who know me are probably not surprised since two years ago I gave up my apartment and moved into a very mobile lifestyle, living in this vintage bluebird bus. But as mobile as my lifestyle has become, a 16-ton vehicle slash home made it difficult to reach some of the rural remote communities I wanted to reach in sending out the message that everyone may make anywhere. And that geography and gender should not be barriers to entering the world of making, coding, and high-tech. So currently, Emma helps me to provide boys and girls, students and teachers, men and women in any community an opportunity to do things with technology they may not have imagined before, like it, and want to do it some more. That's a lot of words, but what does it really look like? Let me share with you a very current example for me. This fall, at Vermont's Mini Maker Faire, I designed an activity that involved almost 50 girls, boys, moms, dads, anywhere from age 5 to 85, where we collaboratively built a 3D printer over the span of two days. Lots of people stopped by our exhibit to be part of that build, including Sydney and her dad. A few hours later, after the Mini Maker Faire was finished, I got a text from Sydney's dad, asking for the model number of the kit that we had started from so he could buy one for his daughter so she could build one at home. Sydney had the inspiration, the support, the confidence she needed to successfully complete that build. Sydney had been part of our TechSavvyGirls camp since she was in third grade and was now a high school mentor slash leader at TechSavvyGirls camp. You should have seen the face of this year's campers when Sydney taught them how to print in 3D using a 3D printer that she had built herself. Well, this year, at the Champlain Maker Mini Faire in Vermont, three of the girls that Sydney had mentored this previous summer and their moms drove down two hours from their little town tucked away in the northeast kingdom of Vermont to share what they had learned at camp with the others at the Mini Maker Faire about how to integrate circuits and objects that they had created to make this collaborative community garden and code it with a microprocessor to give those objects this unique presence in our garden. In the next few minutes, I'll share more about the garden idea with you. But first, I'd like to share with you what was the highlight of that weekend for me at Mini Maker Faire. I was feeling pretty good watching how confident these young ladies were, helping children and their parents create and contribute objects to the garden with LEDs and batteries and circuits. But the icing on the cake that day for me was when I sent those girls out to explore the rest of the Maker Faire and different shifts, each one of them came back having purchased an Arduino kit from one of the local vendors. One of them even texted me on the way home to ask me how to get started with that kit. The fact that these girls now had a lens about technology where they knew that the Arduino kit that they had seen there would provide them with more access to power, skills and options. The fact that they even had enough confidence to feel like they could learn to use this or had access to resources or mentors that could help them. This made me smile. It was exactly what I was aiming for in my work with these young ladies. Confidence. Confidence that they too belong and can be successful in any career that uses technology. There are many ways to build that confidence. And I have so many stories of young women I've worked with who've reached that level of confidence. Young women like Maya who had enough confidence to stick it out in her high school computer programming class, even though she was the only girl. Or Samantha who headed out to college to major in civil engineering, where she was one of two girls in a class full of young men who had lots of experience using the tools that were put in front of them. Or Heidi who built her own computer as her senior project in one of my classes. Or Sydney, who you just met, who built a 3D printer after last year's Mini Maker Faire. A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelly from IDEO in Stanford D. School and discovered that much of what I've been doing with girls and tech used the same strategies that Tom and David Kelly described in their book, Creative Confidence. Especially the strategies of my new collaborative community garden project. This collaborative community garden project came to me when I first saw MIT's robotic garden designed to teach coding. The garden was colorful, fascinating, engaging, and it quickly drew me to the state of wonder and feeling, this is so cool. I soon found myself thinking, we could do this. I had just enough knowledge from the e-textile Santa hat project I had been working on at the time to imagine how the Arduino microprocessor were controlling the flowers. I didn't know exactly how, but my e-textile project was building my confidence in my understanding of microprocessors and coding. And I started to imagine making some of the flowers I saw in the MIT garden. It felt within reach, it felt beautiful, it felt geeky, and I was inspired. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if our tech savvy girls could build something like this? And of course, I went to the place I was getting confidence with coding and microprocessors, e-textiles. And that's the place I'd like to get you started with today. First, let's start with what is e-textiles? E-textiles is pretty much any project that includes fabric and an able some type of digital component or electronic to be embedded within it. It can be as simple as this crafty bracelet or as complex as this amazing dress that a group of girls collaborated with some fashion designers from the Google Made with Code project. When I first learned about e-textiles, I knew it was an area that was going to make its way into my work with young women. What I didn't realize at the time was that you can use the skills you learn in e-textiles and all types of projects. You are not limited to fabric. I found this a very low-threshold, high-sealing activity. Throw in some origami paper, duct tape, pom-poms, and yes, garden supplies. And all of a sudden, our imagination of what we could build was virtually unstoppable. I could not walk into a dollar store or stop at a garage sale without thinking of the different possibilities for creating and making with circuits. And neither could the girls that I worked with. What I saw was an increasing understanding of materials and how they work together. An increase in their understanding of the simple circuits they learned back in grade four. They now had a reason to use that information to create and make something beautiful. So to grow my own confidence with e-textiles, I started to follow two amazing e-textile experts, researchers, authors, and makers. Leah Buickley and Kylie Pepper. And I strongly recommend Leah's book, So Electric, and Kylie's book, Soft Circuits, as a great entry point for anyone interested in getting started with e-textiles, especially if you're working in a school setting. As a matter of fact, most of the chapters of So Electric are available for free at soelectric.org. Check them out. Although most e-textile projects will give you confidence with using conductive thread and sobel LEDs, I wanted to quickly move the girls to a place where they were confident with code. There are lots of resources out there, from Hour of Code to Code.org to Google's CS First, where students can build their confidence and earn badges as they learn to code. But the MIT Robot Program had me thinking about having the girls work together to build something physical with code. It'd be colorful, it'd be social, it'd be collaborative. And to me, that sounded like a fun way for my girls to understand the power of code and build their confidence with learning to code. I quickly approached other female maker educators, Jill Dawson and Leah Jolie, who were also exploring e-textiles with me at this time. And with the help of Vermont Works for Women, giving us some funds for supplies, we organized a series of Girls Make It Days at the Generator, a makerspace in Burlington, Vermont, where I'm a member. And we piloted some of our ideas. On our first Girls Make It Day, we focused on projects that increased the girls' confidence with circuits. Each girl left with projects they had created using LEDs, batteries, copper tape, wire, alligator clips, and other materials. We also sent each group of girls back to their school with supplies they needed to teach others in their schools. Because we all know that the ability to teach others really demonstrates and cements understanding. And it also builds confidence. We invited the girls back a couple months later to go to the next level. Each girl was asked to bring back two flowers that they had created that used an LED and a coin cell battery in the design. Our goal was to teach them to assemble these together in a flower arrangement that they designed and add an Arduino board called the lily pad and learn to add code to control the lights of their flower arrangement. The coding lessons were a blend of unplugged activities, hands-on activities, with their own flower arrangements controlled by the lily pad Arduino. We were very strategic in how we introduced the lessons so that the girls left confident in their understanding of the code they were using. So often a lot of Arduino projects involve cutting and pasting code that you don't really understand into the Arduino IDE. You might understand parts of the code, but it felt that this approach would not increase most students' confidence with being able to make with code. I also found that the form factor to the lily pad Arduino contributed to the level of confidence the girls had when making and coding. The alligator clips and the lily pad portal board were easy to work with and allowed the girls to visually see the flow of the circuits and the way that the code controlled each pin and also the objects that the pins were connected to. Overall, the form factor was friendly, inviting, and removed some of the stereotypes commonly associated with technology and coding. I frequently show the Arduino Uno and the lily pad Arduino to folks, and I get a much more positive reaction from women and girls. It just feels accessible to them. By the end of the second day, the girls had become more confident in their designs and they wanted a more permanent way to secure their creations to the lily pad Arduino. Their interest in soldering grew naturally out of that environment, and thankfully the makerspace had soldering irons and some of the girls left with an even higher level of confidence, having added solder to their projects to make them even more secure. After two days piloting the idea of creating and coding a collaborative community garden, I became excited about the possibilities to go deeper with this concept. I started to create activities that would include more complex coding concepts that moved beyond variables and sequences. Fading flowers was a perfect opportunity to bring in loops and branching. The collaborative nature of the project gave us reason to learn functions. Not only did these girls confidence grow, so did their skill level with code, and so did their imagination in what was possible and their desire to learn. Our next step is to include sensors and motion in the design of our garden. We're not MIT. We don't have access to those self-sticking actuators that you will find in the MIT robotic garden. But that's okay. We have lots of ideas, including this model created by Maxine, one of the high school mentors that uses laser cut pedals on a servo motor. As this idea and project has grown, my desire to increase access to the power of making to students and teachers, no matter where they're locating, including our most remote rural communities, and no matter what their experiences or their gender continues to grow. This past winter, I got to visit the geek bus, which serves the San Antonio schools and thought to myself, the lot needs a mobile maker studio to bring maker opportunities to our small rural communities. And I started to search for a mobile studio for creating and making. By mid-summer, I had adopted Emma to help promote the belief that everyone may make anywhere. Emma's maiden voyage was to Tech Savvy Girls Camp in the Northeast Kingdom, where we built the confidence with circuits and code to 14 young ladies, three of which joined Emma at the Champlain Maker minifair. Emma also visited Essex Middle School and gave a dozen young ladies the confidence with circuits they needed to join us at the Champlain Minifair and help pass that confidence on to parents and young children. Emma has started to visit other schools and communities and is starting to look for others who desire to connect mentors, makers, students, teachers and anyone who believes that everyone may make anywhere. If you've got an idea for a project that would build the confidence of everyone, boys and girls in creating and making and coding, or just want to connect with us or with others who have the same vision, please follow Emma's journey. Better yet, let's collaborate. If you could use any of these ideas in your practice, I'd love to hear about it. I'd be happy to share some of the resources I've been working on and other resources I've collected. And I'd love to hear your ideas for different ways that we can engage everyone, boys and girls in creating, making and coding. As I mentioned at the start of this session, I live a fairly mobile lifestyle and would love to connect anytime my bus is in your neck of the woods. After 30 years in K-12 education, I now consider myself a freelance educator, which leaves me open for many collaborations. My three blogs, Tech Savvy Girls, Create, Make, Learn and the Learning with Lucy blog are most active during the months when I'm on the road full time. The other half of the year, I'm busy with a summer institute for teachers called Create, Make, Learn that you are welcome to join in spending time with my grandchildren. I teach at the University of Vermont and Marlborough College, and I'd love to collaborate with any of you on any of these topics. Or feel free to use any of this contact information to reach out. Love to hear from you.