Google’s “Mind the Gap” program launched seven years ago with the goal of changing the way girls perceive Computer Science (CS) and encouraging them to develop an interest in the field. What started with office visits and an annual conference, has evolved into a holistic program that includes youth-to-youth mentoring, unconscious bias training for teachers, and a summer camp to prepare high school girls for the CS Olympiad. “Mind the Gap” has reached over 6000 girls in Israel and expanded to Google offices around the world (New York, Tokyo, Krakow, Zurich and more coming this year).
I led the program, with a core team of volunteers in 2014-2015, and together we reorganized the program and scaled it up. We chose 40 schools, and with them we decided to “go deeper”. Each school will participate in the four components of the program, for three years.
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School visits - The goal of these visits is to expose ninth grade girls to the world of technology around them, spark their interest in the field of Computer Science, and provide access to role models in the field. A two hour visit includes a presentation about technology in the real world, Q&A with Google engineers, and a tour of the office.
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MentorIt - A program intended to scale Google’s reach by encouraging high school girls already studying CS to become CS “ambassadors” at their schools. These mentors are encouraged to serve as a source of knowledge and inspiration for female 9th grade students by delivering CS classes and making themselves accessible for questions.
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Mind the Teachers - A “surfacing subconscious biases” workshop for teachers, intended to increase their awareness of gender bias at school.
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CS summer school - A twelve-week summer camp intended to prepare a group of girls for the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) national exam. Topics covered over the course of camp includes: Dynamic Programing, Recursion and Binary Search, Sorting Algorithms, Data Structures, and Combinatorial Games.