Upcoming event: theQuiz(); 20th June 2012

Posted on May 19, 2012 by manchester

Ampersand Commerce  &  Manchester Girl Geeks  present:

theQuiz(); Wednesday 20th June, from 6pm

@Ampersand, 3C Tariff Street, Manchester

http://thequizmcr.eventbrite.com
Join us for an evening of geekery, competing for honour and prizes while having drinks and snacks. Find a team of 4, or come solo and we’ll put teams together. Everyone is welcome. In true Manchester Girl Geek spirit, if you are a guy, try and bring a girl with you. But if you can’t, don’t worry, you are still welcome! There will be great prizes and everyone will get a free gift.

Categories include

  • quiz.init(‘programming’);
  • Manchester Knowledge
  • The Front-End
  • Famous Geeks & Stuff Geeks Like
  • eCommerce

Places are strictly limited! Sign up now: http://thequizmcr.eventbrite.com

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Upcoming Omniversity classes: CSS&HTML, WordPress, Arduinos

Posted on May 29, 2012 by manchester

When they’re not busy building volcanos or throwing fancy dress parties, our friends at the MadLab run the fantastic Omniversity – affordable and super-friendly tech courses run by experts. They’ve got some classes coming up in June and July that we highly recommend to our Girl Geeks audience – for more information, click on the links!

Web Design Foundations 4:Advanced CSS and HTML topics, 11th and 18th June
The advanced CSS and HTML topics we’re looking at take HTML and CSS further, looking at topics including multi-column layouts, cross-browser issues, CSS sprites, faux columns, optimizing layouts for different devices such as mobile phones, CSS3 transitions, transforms and animation, HTML5 video and forms – and more.

Beginners’ guide to Arduino and Physical Computing, 9th June
Physical computing and Arduino devices have made physical interaction affordable and available to non-experts. Whether creating interactive installations, information systems, prototyping products, or making new interfaces, there is a whole world of DIY electronics, interaction design and rapid prototyping available through this platform.

WordPress for Beginners, 7th and 8th July
We’re lucky enough to have WordPress co-founder Mike Little join us for this hands-on introductory course to building a website or a blog with WordPress. One not to be missed.

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Upcoming Event – Hama Time!

Posted on April 2, 2012 by katie

Hama Beads, 8-Bit Gaming and QR Codes
Sunday 29th April, 2-4.30pm
MadLab, Manchester

Click here to get your tickets now!

For April’s Girl Geek Tea Party, Hama expert Rosarie O’Donahoe will be coming in to show us how to make things using Hama beads. These are tiny tubular plastic beads which you can arrange into shapes and then melt with an iron to produce a brilliant plastic picture you can take away with you and use as a coaster, badge or super-bling massive pendant.

Mario sprites made from Hama Beads, by JayEmBee on Flickr

But since this is Girl Geeks, we won’t just be making any old shapes out of Hama beads! Girl Geek Kat Reeve will be there with a fine selection of old-school 8-bit retro computer games.You can have a go at playing computer games like they used to in the old days, then make your favourite characters or sprites out of the beads. We will provide some computer game sprite images for you to work from, or you can make up your own!

QR code to Manchester Girl Geeks website, made at qrcode.Kaywa.com

And not only this, but also mathematician and Girl Geek Katie Steckles will be telling us all about QRcodes, the magical 2D barcodes which are all over the internet these days. She’ll explain for us how the data is encoded into a QR code and how they work, and then you can use your Hama beads to make a QR code of your very own to take home, linking to a website of your choice or just encoding your name or a secret message.

Attendance at the workshop is by Eventbrite and costs £3 (includes unlimited tea and hama beads :) , so click here to get your tickets!

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Event Review: Women in Science Fair at MOSI

Posted on March 24, 2012 by evelyn

On Sun Mar 18th, visitors of MOSI got a rare treat to meet some of the great women scientists of our history. On site were:

  • Delia Derbyshire, a pioneer of early electronic music who also composed the musical score for Dr Who in 1963
  • Grace Hopper, a pioneer of early computer programming languages
  • Marie Curie, a Polish-French scientist who won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering Radiation and another Nobel Prize in Chemistry for techniques she developed to separate radium metal from its ore
  • Caroline Herschel, an astronomer who discovered several comets, she was the first women to work as a science professional

Other famous women scientist honoured at the event included Florence Nightingale who used her mathematic skills to analyze data from the hospital to discover that the main cause of death was because of poor sanitation. Profiles of other equally fabulous modern day women scientists were featured on posters decorated throughout the gallery.

Everyone had a great time going around the different stations and participating in activities such as designing your own planet, spelling out your name in binary ASCII and making a badge out of it, building robots with the Robogals, and creating your own electronic music!

Thanks to the Museum of Science and Industry for hosting the event and to Nicola Frost from MOSI for the great support!

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Upcoming event: Girl Geek Dinner 9, 28th March

Posted on March 13, 2012 by sam

Cisco logoManchester Girl Geek Dinner 9: Meet Cisco Systems & Jane Kenyon
**WEDNESDAY*** 28th March 2012
6.30pm for 7pm start
@ Revolution Bar, Oxford Street, Manchester

We’re absolutely delighted to announce the 9th Manchester Girl Geek Dinner with two fantastic speakers.

  • Madiha Sayed is a Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems, which she joined through the graduate program in 2005. In 2011, she was shortlisted for a CWT Everywoman in Technology Award in the “Rising Star of the Year” category! Madiha will give us an insight into her work and career at Cisco.
    Cisco was named “one of the top 50 employers for women” in 2011, and we’re also hoping to learn a little more about that.
  • Jane Kenyon, entrepreneur, inspirational speaker and business coach, will be talking about the charitable projects she started to support girls and women. She visited us at our last Girl Geek Dinner in 2011 to talk about Girls Out Loud, and we were so impressed by her short talk that we had to invite her again!

Tickets for this event are free and include a free drink (thanks to our sponsors!) Revolution offer an extensive food menu, so feel free to come early for dinner (we will be there from 6.30, with talks starting at 7pm), or join us after the talks for food and drinks :)

Book your free ticket here! http://mancggd9.eventbrite.co.uk

 

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Event Review: Coding Intro with Codeacademy

Posted on February 28, 2012 by evelyn

Last week, Manchester Girl Geeks held their “Intro to Coding Workshop” hosted by Kat Reeve (@BinaryKitten). We dove right in, first with a bit of history and background to where coding came from, then we got hands-on with our laptops and iPads. The level of concentration was intense and you could hear the synapses firing as we set our keyboards ablaze with all the tapping and typing we did with Codeacademy.

Codeacademy is a new interactive way to learn programming by completing guided exercises online.  It is a great initiative but sometimes it can still be a bit daunting to get started. The Manchester Girl Geeks workshop helped pool people together to provide an encouraging atmosphere to get on it. With an army of volunteers milling about the top floor of MadLab to our 30+ participants, everyone felt confident that they would have help when they needed it. We learned about confirming/denying, variables, numbers and strings, editor and arrays and creating “what if” statements. Fuelled with tea and cake, there were not any challenges we couldn’t overcome!

Check out our storify to hear what others had to say and to see the kind impact we made with our new coding comrades both at and beyond our event!

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Upcoming event – Celebrating International Women’s Day

Posted on February 22, 2012 by katie

Women in Science Fair
Sunday 18th March, 1-3pm
Museum of Science and Industry, Castlefield

For International Women’s Day and National Science & Engineering Week 

Grace Hopperposter

Since March is the month of International Women’s Day, Manchester Girl Geeks is teaming up with the Museum of Science and Industry again to put on a fantastic afternoon at MOSI, where you can find out about how women were important in scientific discoveries!

Did you know that a woman invented the windscreen wiper, and liquid paper? Did you know that it was a woman who first discovered radioactivity, and coined the term? That a woman pioneered the use of graphs to represent statistical data? And a woman created the first computer compiler?

Florence Nightingale

On Sunday afternoon (1-3pm), we will be joined by some well-known (and not so well-known) female scientists, engineers and mathematicians from throughout history. Each will be represented by an actor, in the appropriate costume, to explain what it was like being a woman in their lifetime. We will also have Girl Geeks on hand to explain the science they were responsible for, and to provide some fun hands-on activities for you to take part in.

 

Entry to the event is free (no need to book!) and we recommend you combine it with a visit to MOSI to see their amazing other exhibits. Let us know if you’re attending: http://www.facebook.com/events/264021727007241/

If you want to share the event with friends and family, download our awesome poster (thanks to Andrew Taylor for the drawing!):

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Let’s get private: Personal Information Security, 7th March 2012

Posted on February 13, 2012 by sam

Wednesday 7th March, 2 – 5pm 
@ University of Manchester, University Place on Oxford Rd 

This event is hosted by Manchester Girl Geeks and Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (WiSET) at the University of Manchester. It aims at female students aged 16 and above.

Have you ever thought about how your messages are transferred over the internet?

Do you like sending (digital) postcards (e.g. your e-mails) which can be read by third parties without your awareness? No? You can change that!

If you would like to get a brief introduction into cryptography (e. g. sending sealed letters instead of postcards) and insights from Dr. Ning Zhang, a female senior lecturer who leads the security research group* at the University of Manchester, you don’t want to miss out this event!

Dr. Ning Zhang will give a talk about how she got engaged in the field of cryptography and what the topics of current research are, followed by questions and answers.
Afterwards there will be a hands-on session about employing GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) – including a demonstration of how public key cryptography works (without the maths, though). In addition to that there will be plenty of time for networking.

Tickets 

This is a free event for female students, age 16 and above. Book your ticket here:  http://infosecurity0703.eventbrite.co.uk

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New Year, New Sponsors

Posted on February 2, 2012 by sam

NAG logoWe’re excited and very pleased to get so much interest and support from partners in industry; it’s great to see that what we do with Manchester Girl Geeks is recognized as being relevant and important work. We’re also very pleased that our sponsors are just as happy about working with us as we are, as is the case with the Numerical Algorithms Group, producer of numerical and statistical software (amongst others) who also have an office in Manchester’s city centre. Katie O’Hare from NAG has written a great blog post to announce their sponsorship for this year  - a big thank you to everyone at NAG and to Katie for the great contact. We’re looking forward to inviting a speaker from NAG to one of our next events (tba), and we’re hoping to get some interesting information, updates and possibly job ads from NAG for our fellow girl geeks!

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Upcoming Event: An Intro to Coding, 19th February

Posted on February 1, 2012 by sam

With the help of www.codecademy.com, our very own girl geek Kat (aka @binarykitten) will walk and talk you through the first steps to writing your own code (in JavaScript, to be precise). This short intro class is aimed at absolute beginners, who have little or no knowledge of programming, as well as people who would like to refresh their coding skills. Children from age 10 and older who know how to use a computer are more than welcome, too! Feel free to bring your young ones and share a laptop with them.

The class will be around 2 hours with plenty of explanations of what and why you are coding. And as always, there will time for tea, biscuits and chats with other girl geeks and soon-to-be geeks!

When & Where:
Sunday, 19th February 2012, 2-4.30pm
@MadLab, Manchester (Northern Quarter)

Tickets
We only have limited spaces for this event. In order to make sure that everyone who wants to come gets a ticket, we charge our usual £2 booking fee for this event. We will provide some tea & biscuits, but we would like to point out that our venue – MadLab – appreciates donations. Look out for the donation cat :)

For more info & to secure a ticket, visit: http://ggtpcoding.eventbrite.co.uk

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