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Cover Page | WISSC's seamless user interface and intelligent Python algorithm make it easy to connect
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Problem Identification | 74% of teen girls say they are interested in STEM but 4 in 10 say they don’t get enough practical experience
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Target Audience | Integrated user flow between educators and women+ STEM professionals
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Algorithm Front-End | The simple 5-question form gives users their best speaker match from a set of 300 randomly generated .csv datasets
Inspiration
👩❤️💋👨 Funnily enough, the inspiration for WISSC came from an idea I had to code a dating app to find people with common interests. But, I wanted my hack to be based on making a social impact and helping an underrepresented group of people. Through research, I found that nearly 50% of girls interested in STEM don’t know a woman in STEM. Some other shocking facts are listed down below, and serve as inspiration for this product:
🙆🏾 74% of teen girls say they are interested in STEM but 4 in 10 say they don’t get enough practical experience
🙍♀️By age 15, many girls tend to lose confidence in STEM subjects
❌ If women pursuing STEM undergraduate degrees do graduate, they are less likely to work in STEM-related fields compared to men, resulting in women making up less than 1⁄4 of people employed in STEM
💻 The UK Resource Centre reveals that only 5.3%, or one in twenty, of all working women are employed in any science, engineering and technology occupations compared to 31.3%, or one in three, of men
What it does
👩🏼🏫WISSC is a peer-to-peer platform for women in STEM to connect with educators looking for community speakers to enrich their classrooms.
✌️WISSC has 2 target markets: 1) teachers at all levels who want to bring more applicable knowledge to the classroom, and 2) women in STEM who want to are interested in finding a community of like-minded individuals, encouraging girls to go into STEM fields through classroom talks, and making a positive societal impact.
How we built it
🎨The front-end was built using Figma, with some design elements taken from Canva as well. Firstly, a web page was designed using components, illustrations, and a cohesive colour scheme.
📲The back-end was built using Python, with 300 randomly generated datasets being generated on Excel and exported as a .csv.
Challenges we ran into
🕐Too many to count! Having never taken a coding class before and only having basic experience with Python, it was a struggle to complete all the elements of the hack. I spent way too long on the design and pulled an all-nighter to finish the technical aspects, but I had a lot of fun in the meantime.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
🐍I'm proud of delivering a final hack that works, and is interactive on the front-end and back-end. I'm also proud of completing my first hackathon by myself, and designing the entire product from beginning to end. I learned new skills in Figma and learned how to actually code using Python (after spending an hour trying to figure out what an IDE is).
What we learned
👀I learned that I really enjoy coding and designing, so I'll definitely be joining SheHacks again next year and will have my eyes peeled for other hackathons in the future.
What's next for WISSC | Women in STEM Speakers Collective
💋Since the algorithm is quite simple and resembles a search query, there is still room for complexity; it would be helpful to add more specific interests for different categories (ie. climate change and sustainability under the 'Science' general interest category). The algorithm is quite scalable, and can be used in multiple applications - even for a dating app.
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