Pittsburgh Tech Girls Rock in free workshop at Sarah Heinz House

It’s quite an honor for Sarah Heinz House – and for Pittsburgh. Of the 4,000 Boys & Girls Clubs of America, just a half dozen or so were selected to host a Tech Girls Rock workshop.

The free, girls-only workshop on April 13 at Sarah Heinz House invites girls between 10 to 18 years to explore information technology. A partnership between Boys & Girls Clubs of America and CA Technologies provided funding for the 125 slots. The workshop is open to all girls, regardless of membership in a Boys & Girls Club. (Interested? Register now before it fills up.)

The day includes learning to code using Hummingbird, Dash, or Finch robots. Girls will participate in hands-on, technology-focused challenges that are designed for fun and help develop critical thinking skills.

Women engineer mentors will be on hand for a career panel so girls can discuss what led these women to success in their tech careers. Breakfast and lunch are included, plus all girls go home with a T-shirt and a goody bag, including a binary code bracelet.

Girls’ interest in tech is not surprising to Bob Bechtold, Sarah Heinz House director of outreach and corporate partnerships.

“It’s just a matter of exposure,” he says. “When they see the programming and critical thinking and those other components, the competition, they kind of get their gears turning a little bit. And once they see it in that light — in a safe environment where they get to be the leaders and it’s not the boys pushing their way in and taking control. Once they get to play around and tinker, it’s, ‘Oh, this is pretty cool.’ “

The idea behind Tech Girls Rock is to help close the S.T.E.M. — science, technology, engineering, math — achievement and access gap. The National Center for Women in Information Technology reports that, although women earn 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, they attain only 17 percent of S.T.E.M. diplomas. Additionally, women hold only 25 percent of professional computing occupations in the U.S. – even though women make up 57 percent of the workforce.

As an organization, Sarah Heinz House has focused on bridging that gap. Their award-winning robotics team is a good example of diversity with 50 percent girls.

“We do a lot with robotics with girls, we do sustainable program designs with girls, we do a lot of multimedia with girls,” Bechtold says. “This workshop will model that theme. It will be girls who are running the experiments, who are running the programs. They’ll see girls who have launched careers and are making it in the world. And they’ll get a chance to talk to those women as well.

“So hopefully,” he says, “it will be a pretty empowering day.”