Inspiration
In certain parts of STEM, there is a surprising lack of representation of women in the industry. From our friends and family, we've learned that representation can be important in a person's growth and interest in various STEM fields. In a 2020 study by AnitaB.org, the nonprofit organization for supporting women in computing and STEM fields, it was found that the overall representation of women technologists is growing, but is still short of men and others at 28.8%. In a related case study by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research center that informs the public about issues, trends, demographic research amongst other things, named "italics_Representation of women in STEM caries across job clusters,_italics" says the mean average of women in STEM varies across jobs and computer-based jobs have the second-lowest mean average at around 25%. Seeing these statistics as a team, we decided to embark on a quest to make an app to make it more convincing for women to join STEM-related fields, particularly in computing. This is why we built this app to highlight important women figures in STEM.
What it does
The app showcases and teaches about women in science in a fun quiz format including showing pictures of said women used in the quiz and including interesting facts about them. Another thing the app showcases is basic CS concepts with a demonstration of one unit in particular that teaches data types from primitives to non-primitives.
How we built it
We built the app using various tools; Flutter and Dart for the frontend, while Google Cloud Platform and Python for the backend.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenges we ran into is not knowing how to work with GCP and having only had a day to work on the project, all the while going to HackViolet events. With more time we would have added in a section called "Pearls of Wisdom" which was about the experiences of women, polishing the UI, and getting GCP properly set up for hosting.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team, we are proud of how much we did despite the time constraint put on us by the competition. Being able to learn and understand the new tools we had to mess with and to get to the progress we have now is also something we are proud of. We are proud of getting this far in the hackathon.
What we learned
For the frontend team, they had some experiences working with Flutter. It was a breath of fresh air for them to learn how to work with JSON data coming from GCP. Speaking of which, for our backend team, they had to learn how to use GCP. The team was able to set up cloud functions to get our JSON data from.
What's next for the Women in Science app
What's next for the Women in Science app? We may mostly likely integrate the remaining sections or add new sections to it while we polish up the UI and figure out the rest of the GCP configurations.
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