camp, Digigirlz, event, Microsoft, weatherbug

Presenting The Digigirlz Tech Camp For Girls

Posted by on Aug 13, 2008 | No Comments

digigirlz

Girls from all over the US converged on WeatherBug’s corporate offices in Germantown, MD. kicking off a Microsoft and WeatherBug sponsored camp known as “Digigirlz“.

The camp provides college bound young women interested in learning more about a career in technology an opportunity to participate in a three day event where they were able to discover some of the technologies behind weather forecasting and reporting.

Below is a breakdown of each day with the girls as they happened.

Day 1 - The camp kicked off with a tour of Weatherbug‟s corporate offices in Germantown, MD, exposing the Digigirlz to the myriad of technologies used when forecasting and reporting the weather. Many of the girls met Weatherbug.com meteorologist Rachel Peterson and had the opportunity to practice delivering the weather in front of the “green screen”. Univision television taped a 2 minute report and highlighted how the Digigirlz program addresses the need to get more girls interested in technology. Univision TV story here (in espanol).

digigirlz2

 Days 2 and 3 - Trained in Microsoft Popfly, and using lessons from the tour, our Digigirlz worked in teams to demonstrate how conveying the day‟s weather forecast on their school site, and mapping that against planned school activities can make all the difference between having a good time at a school event or missing out on the fun!

popfly-class

Some teams even created a commerce feature on their site for students to purchase umbrellas, hats, and other „bad weather‟ items so that no school activity is ever missed! Below team members present their web page ideas to a panel of Microsoft and Weatherbug judges.

And the winner is “Team 1″ who scored high points on presentation skills for showcasing their web page without mentioning any products!! They showed us all that it‟s best to simply “present the business case”. Besides receiving copies of Microsoft Expression Web Studio, the grand prize for the winners was a behind the scenes tour of WJLA / ABC-7 TV studios including a visit with weather meteorologist Adam Caskey. Well done ladies, and special thanks to Katrina Kirchoff for leading the winning team!

What kind of technology do the Digigirlz work with?

Silverlight-Popfly

Users of Windows and OS X can click the image above to see an example of a Popfly creation.

Popfly is one of the technologies used at the Digigirlz event and the Silverlight powered Popfly app located above gives you an up close look at what some of the Digigirlz creations looked like.
The Popfly example above provides the user with the following options to choose from:

  • Carousel
  • ImageFader
  • MovingSlideShow
  • Pageturner
  • PhotoFlip
  • Photoshow
  • Photostack
  • PhotoSphere
  • PhotoStack
  • Phototiles

Want to tweak the application?

If you would like to make any changes to the Popfly app linked above, just make sure you are logged into Microsoft Live.com account and make any desired changes with this link.

More on Digigirlz!

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If you want to learn more about Digigirlz, who is eligible to participate and where to sign-up, please click here to find out more about the Digigirlz Camp event!