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

Hama Beads (photo by Wikimedia Commons)

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!

Posted in Girl Geek Tea Party, Manchester Girl Geek Events, News | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

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!

Posted in Event reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

 

Posted in Events, Girl Geek Dinner, Manchester Girl Geek Events, Upcoming Events | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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!

Posted in News | Tagged | Leave a comment

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!):

Posted in Manchester Girl Geek Events, News, Upcoming Events | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

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

Posted in Events, Upcoming Events | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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!

Posted in News | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Girl Geek Tea Party, Manchester Girl Geek Events, News, Upcoming Events | Leave a comment

Event Review: The Sun in a Whole New Light with Dr. Lucie Green

Posted on January 29, 2012 by evelyn

Most days in Manchester are grey and rainy, but last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Lucie Green who brightened up our day with her talk on our planet’s closest star – the sun.

Dr. Lucie’s work is specifically on coronal mass ejections (CME) which are eruptions caused by immense magnetic fields that occur on the sun. She showed us some extraordinary videos of the activity between pairs of sunspots which act as opposite poles of magnetic fields where these CMEs occur. These activities on the sun have an impact on us. Disruptions in our electricity grids, pigeons getting lost and the northern lights are just some of the examples of the effects these CMEs have on our planet.

Dr. Lucie also showed us how technology has changed over time. She use to work at NASA and back then she would have had to go into the office to operate her telescope. Nowadays she can do so from her laptop at home.

What’s most notable about Dr. Lucie is her down to earth approach that made her work in science accessible even to those who don’t specialize in her field of study. Even our youngest participants in the audience could follow along and they were not shy to ask their very intelligent questions. We had a great time with Dr. Lucie and we all learned a lot of amazing new things about the sun!

 This event was covered by NRK, a Norwegian radio station. To listen to the recording, visit  http://www.bevanger.co.uk/?p=459.
Dr. Lucie’s tweets @Dr_Lucie.
Can’t enough of Dr. Lucie’s sun science? Watch her presentation on expansion of the sun via YouTube.
Posted in News | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Keep on blogging!

Posted on January 19, 2012 by sam

When we’re not busy organising geeky events for you, some members of team girl geeks sometimes dabble in the fine art of writing (prose, not code). Here’s a quick round-up of recent posts:

 

Posted in News | 1 Comment