These girls are growing up fast and showing interest in STEM learning opportunities. For the fifth year, partners supporting IT-Girls are making sure female students have a fighting chance to live their dreams. These lucky girls won Amazon Fire Tablets as a result of the day's raffle. (See more photos in News/Photo Gallery section)

Every year middle school girls from across Baton Rouge and beyond come together at the Baton Rouge Community College to learn about technology careers, meet industry professionals, and participate in highly engaging hands-on digital workshops. STEMup BR (Foundation for East Baton Rouge School System) and LaWIT (Louisiana Women in Technology) were proud to to host this year's IT Girls for its 5th year in a row. This event is designed to promote the concepts of creative computing and design-based learning to middle-school-aged girls of all skill levels. The event started with career inspiring videos, followed by workshops mentored by volunteers from IBM, LSU, EBR Library, Mozilla, Southern University, BRCC students and many others. One of two beginner’s workshops taught the students how to create stop-motion animation videos, while the other workshop taught girls how to use one of the MIT beginning coding application languages, Scratch, to create games and program robotics hardware called Hummingbirds. Finally, a workshop for girls who have attended the event before or at an advanced level explored JavaScript by using a “creative coding” program called and P5.JS. The goal of all workshops is to foster an appreciation of technology in growing girls and to teach the importance of STEM-based learning and the engineering design process.

Since its inception, the IT Girls’ six-hour event has served over 350 students in grades 6 through 8, with 160 volunteers. A big thanks goes out to our faithful supporters, such as Geocent, Sparkhound, Louisiana Tech Park, Hargrove Engineers, and 30 volunteers and our annual host - Baton Rouge Community College's STEM Department.