Mara

This week in Wednesday night GOSG we continued our work on Kangaroomail, fixing a problem with the site. By the end of the meeting, we had the problem solved and we did a bit more coding. Currently, on the email viewing page, the emails can be clicked on and viewed in a light box, with a small X in the corner of the page to close the light box. Also, when you hover over an email, the text within the box becomes underlined. The first picture shows the page before an email is clicked on, and the second has an email within a light box.

This is Mara

My name is Mara and I am 14 years old. I started learning computer science with Kiki Prottsman of Thinkersmith in September of 2011, and I think it’s amazing! I met her through GOSG (Girls’ Open-Source Group), where we are currently making a parent protected email for kids called Kangaroomail. In the beginning, I was slightly confused about what we were doing, but by the end of my first class, I thought it was great. Kiki is an amazing teacher, and she knows just how to encourage girls.

Within Kangaroomail, I am learning the basics of CSS, php, and html. We have so far created a login page and a basic email viewing page, though each one is still a work in progress. Kiki helped inspire me to use logical thinking and reason to solve problems within the website.

That group led to another class on computer programming, also taught by Kiki. She invited me to join, and it has been wonderful. We started with some logical thinking skills, then worked with Python, a programming language. We just moved from Python to Javascript, which is used with website design. I have learned a lot through both classes.

Through my journey so far within computer programming, I feel I have improved my logical thinking skills a lot. I have learned how to “think like a computer” to translate ideas into code, and the different languages used with each program. I find it amazing to be able to program different things, and I have used this knowledge to edit my own blog. I hope to create a new post soon as I continue to journey through computer science.

Introduction to "Kelsey On Tech"

Always the tone of surprise; and often I’m not quite certain it’s only because my major can be quite daunting in difficulty. I receive a look of confusion and the same phrase, with varying wording, “That’s not a major I would expect YOU to have.” I heard it from my agency, my friends, family, strangers, etcetera. People often explain their surprise by expressing that it’s because I model and that, in particular, makes it such a contradiction. Others are more blatant and say, “I figured you’d be majoring in English. Isn’t computer science heavy on math?”

Well, I did start out as an English major, or rather I did what was expected. Then, I took my first computer science class. It was incredible, all the “Frankenstein-coding” with HTML that I played with on MySpace to make it look “cooler” had become useful in a beginner-esque class. Of course, I wasn’t an expert at computers, like some of my other classmates, but I was thrilled about the prospects and possibilities of programming that were introduced to me. I knew at that point that I had decided on my major. I had always loved computers, but never did it cross my mind I could study them to the extent of a computer science degree.

And so begins the introduction to my blog “Kelsey on Tech,” an exploration through blogs and vlogs on entering a male-dominated major with limited experience.