of NCWIT’s Aspirations in Computing program. She took some time to talk about her book, its focus on Spanish-speaking children, and her view on the importance of increased diversity and representation in technology careers. In eighth grade, I took this coding class called “Coding for Fun,” and it actually happened by accident because it worked with my schedule and it was the only elective class available.
When I was creating these resources, I had to do it by hand since there was nothing really available to me online. I made sure to meet with different engineers in Mexico who would know the correct terminology for things like “Python shell” and “command prompt” because I didn’t want to butcher anything in case the technical terms are different.
Once they have the text editor set up, I go into a bit of basic math because I noticed the disparity level in basic math concepts were a bit lacking in the students I tutor in Mexico versus the ones I tutor here in the United States. So, we learn about binary numbers, exponents, mods, and how to translate these math concepts into lines of code.
I’m a TECHNOLOchicas ambassador in partnership with NCWIT, and we work on expanding to more Latinos who want to go into tech. I recently attended one of their conferences and we were talking about natural language processing, and an ambassador namedtaught me about how it is really important to her work to identify the importance of the lack of Spanish datasets in the work that she’s doing.
Wow! Great job Athena!