SciTech Girls´ Project

The International Women’s Hackathon is a crowdsourcing event to empower young women leaders in computer science. By providing a fun and safe environment in which to explore computing, the hackathon encourages and supports university women around the world to become producers of future innovations in technology and help solve challenges in the world today. After much success last year and many requests to hold the event again this year, we are pleased to announce that the next event is planned for the weekend of April 25 to 27, 2014, on university campuses all over the world. We will connect via Skype from our live event at the USA Science & Engineering Festival with all worldwide sites during the hackathon.

Read more: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/womens-hackathon2014

"What the Hack" is a game-based mobile application geared for girls who want to know more about technological careers and the role of women in them. What the Hack provides a basis for event information to facilitate knowledge sharing and to encourage participation, which also ensures the exchange between young girls in their early academic activities and professional women, and their technological jobs thus generating culture, improving networking, as well as enabling the recognition of something they have created by themselves. Additionally, participation in such events also contributes by showcasing successful women in these fields.

Read more: http://wthehack.blogspot.com.br

MakeUPhi is a mobile application that analyzes a woman’s face based on the golden ratio and thus, gives beauty enhancing makeup tips.
MakeUPhi aims to show one of the relationships between mathematics and the female universe, in this case, faminine beauty and makeup. The  facial porportions, in spacial, are objects used by the mathematics to say if human face is beautyful or not. Have a long time that the golden number is a referential to do it. To do it altomatcally we can use a face mask based in the golden ratio.

Read more: http://makeuphiapp.blogspot.com.br

Some people find the push to excel from within themselves—no external motivators necessary. Professor Rosiane de Freitas is one such woman, constantly looking for a challenge, continually pushing herself to the limit. After earning her PhD in systems engineering and computing from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, she joined the Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Amazonas (ICOMP/UFAM), where she teaches and conducts research in combinatorial optimization and graph theory.

It was an interesting and inspiring experience to participate in the First International Women’s Hackathon in 2013. We were the only site in Brazil to field a team of young female university students. Ludymila, Mariane, Bruna, and Ingrid, undergraduate students in computer science and computer engineering at the Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Amazonas (ICOMP/UFAM), developed Mommy's BeneFIT: a mobile application aimed at keeping women physically fit during pregnancy.

Although it wasn’t easy to organize a competition of this magnitude, the assistance of people from Microsoft Research—especially Rane Johnson and Juliana Salles—and the support of colleagues at ICOMP/UFAM and such partner institutions as INdT-Manaus simplified the task. As did the strong interest and high motivation of the young women, who had to dedicate time to the competition amidst the demands of exams, other science projects, and a heavy class load. In addition, they had only limited experience with the development platform used in the competition.


These intrepid young women shrugged off the obstacles, learning to manage their time and develop mobile apps for Windows Phone, identifying a suitable target app (one that was either unavailable on the market or whose current solution could be improved), learning about the target market, developing a functional app and testing it with users, and creating a promotional video that highlighted the best features of their solution. Thus, they played the roles of software engineers, software analysts, user experience designers, graphics designers, programmers, and marketing designers.

Read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msr_er/archive/2014/04/18/inspiring-female-hackers-in-brazil.aspx