Inspiration
Women of color have made countless contributions to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, but schools often fail to teach us about these awesome ladies.
Open any high school history book and it's a challenge to find more than one or two black female scientists. Asian, Latina, or Native women? Forget about it.
These gaps in our education aren't because women of color scientists don't exist. Have you ever heard of Annie Easley, Rajeshwari Chatterjee, or Laura Gomez? Did you know that a black woman invented the home security system, or that an Iranian woman was awarded the most prestigious award in mathematics?
These women each broke their own Glass Ceiling, and their achievements are forging new pathways for girls interested in STEM. The Glass Ceiling app aims to inspire girls by teaching them about these amazing achievements.
What it does
Glass Ceiling is a virtual arcade where girls can play games to unlock printable trading cards for women of color scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
How we built it
To create the trading cards, we did research on a wide variety of websites. Information about the scientists was gathered from articles, interviews, videos, tweets and more. We designed the trading card template from scratch on Canva, and designed custom avatars for each scientist with EmojiMe.
On the coding end, we began by imputing all of the basic information about scientists (name, dob, ect) into a database. Using PHP we created webpages that called the data from the database to display the information. Using Bootstrap and CSS, we customized the pages.
Challenges we ran into
As a finished product Glass Ceiling would have a unique game for every scientist, based on her own achievements, that teaches kids different math and science skills. Due to hackathon time constraints, every level is the same open source game. This game (Connect Four) is really just a placeholder for games that will be added in the future.
Also, because the game is written in javascript, there were issues with customizing it because javascript and PHP cannot be used together without additional tools. So, in the site's current stage, you are able to unlock cards without actually beating the game. This issue will be fixed in future releases by switching to HTML5-based games.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of creating this awesome database of amazing women. We're proud of attending our first hackathon and proving, once again, that women of color can create something that matters.
What we learned
Angelica came in with only two weeks of programming experience, and learned how to input information into the MySQL database and customize CSS code.
Jocelyn improved her Bootstrap, CSS, and PHP skills, and got her first experience implementing open source games into larger projects.
More than anything, we learned so much by researching the 16 scientists on these cards. Just like the young girls in our target audience, we were inspired by the amazing accomplishments of these women.
What's next for Glass Ceiling
First of all, we have to fix the problems listed above. Beyond that, we would love to actually develop unique games for the arcade, rather than using open source code. We would also love to expand our database of scientists, and add more items (scholarships, summer camps, etc.) to the Resources page.
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