September has been filled with events as we never want to miss out on opportunities for learning, gaining new friendships and growing our startup. We pitched, we trained, we shared ideas and built new contacts. It helped us gain new confidence and more knowledge in how to move forward with imagiCase. STHLM Tech Fest, FemTech Bootcamp, Fast Track Malmö Bootcamp, to name a few, were just as important for us for growing and learning as any key exam would have been for a student in college.
However, nothing has been more enriching, more memorable, engaging and fun as meeting and teaching code to girls at our workshops at Teklafestival under Music Tech Fest Stockholm. For those who are not familiar with the event, MTF Stockholm is an international festival of music ideas and innovation, which also puts a strong emphasis on gender equality. The workshops were organized by imagiLabs and co-hosted by EIT Digital Academy Sweden.
For this special event, we prepared a cute device with leds to help the girls see how their code behaves in real time. We call it imagiCube. It’s fun, versatile, colorful and it can “dance”.
Our co-founder / engineer Beatrice, had the stamina to assemble, glue, program, test and debug all 30 imagiCubes for these workshops in a record time of 4 days. And we are not counting in the many hours that went into 3d printing, laser cutting, planning and organizing before that (where Dori steadily pitched in). “It was hard and tiring”, Beatrice confesses, “but totally worth it when you think how much the girls enjoyed using them”.
We started our workshop with a very short introduction about how devices communicate with each other through Bluetooth and how the output of code we write in our imagiApp is then displayed by the led matrix on the little imagiCubes. We started with writing really simple code in Python to create a dot on the imagiCube, then we let the girls come up with their own designs.
The code got more advanced as we wanted to change the color of our work and as we split the display of the design into two matching imagiCubes.
The highlight of the workshop was probably when the girls learnt to make their creations blink on the rhythm of their favorite song. Even though choosing the perfect tune was nearly impossible, we finally got the imagiCubes “moving” in unison to the beats of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off - which, in our opinion, was a good way to end the workshop.
We ran two workshops of two hours each, with two groups of girls, 8-11 years old and 12-14 years old. However, two hours wasn’t enough for how many things we could program on the imagiCubes. Thanks to the organisers, the participants got to take home their imagiCube and continue to create more designs with code.
We are keeping in touch with the group and sharing coding tips, sparking their curiosity, and helping them make progress in their programming journey. Meanwhile, we are continuously improving our product as we prepare for launch.
Our mission is to make coding accessible to more children. If you are interested to participate in our workshops sign up here and we will notify you about our upcoming events.
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