You Can STEM

Inspiration

As women in STEM, some of us from different academic and professional backgrounds, we are really passionate about encouraging others to join STEM fields. We aren't developers, we aren't computer scientists, but we work in tech - we love the work we do and want to send the message we wish we'd gotten when we were younger - anyone with the interest and passion belongs in tech as exactly who they are.

What it does

You Can STEM is a platform that encourages girls to explore STEM applications in their areas of interest. We really wanted to build a platform where girls can see themselves in STEM, through discovering their own interests, seeing girls their age doing cool stuff, learning about what's happening in STEM, and also by seeing women who are really at the top of their fields. There are tools to find passion projects to learn about STEM, to connect with mentors, and to support parents and educators in helping their girls identify and pursue fulfilling career paths. We designed it for mobile, but it also works on desktop.

How we built it

We are a group of human-computer interaction masters students, so we went all in on our user research process - or as "all in" as you can get at a hackathon! We completed five 20-minute interviews with women who are either in or have a window into the world of STEM. We also wrote up a survey to understand experiences of people in STEM and sent it out to our graduate program and Technica Slack channels and did some background research online. Then, we analyzed our user research for high level themes and quotes and followed the Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology to come up with our final design.

The key aspects to the GV Design Sprint methodology are map, sketch, design, prototype, and test. Typically, this happens over the course of a week with one day focusing on each of those aspects. We did a 'quick and dirty' version of an already abbreviated design process, which led us to the prototype we're presenting to you today.

Challenges we ran into

The time limit was certainly the biggest challenge! We would have loved to spend more time polishing our prototype or even pushing ourselves to try to code - we are designers, not developers, so we definitely were out of our comfort zone in zipping through this prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We pushed ourselves as designers and chose to focus on user research. The methodology we focus on in school is called Contextual Inquiry, which is a lengthy, in-depth process. Taking on this challenge of designing with an abbreviated version of an abbreviated process was a stretch for us, but we're really happy with how it came out and how much we learned. As a group and as individuals, we got some great insight into how we can move even more smoothly next time.

We are so excited about how many incredible people we connected with during our research project and the enthusiasm we felt from the Technica community. We wrote up a survey and sent it out to the Technica Slack channel and within two hours we had more responses than we imagined! Everyone we met at the hackathon was willing to share their experiences with us, and we're proud of the way we captured that energy and used it to build this platform. Our team is also proud of building a platform that we would have loved to use ourselves - messaging and encouragement are so important for anyone making big career choices, and we hope You Can STEM is a meaningful way to do that for brilliant, passionate girls around the world!

What we learned

We learned about Design Sprint methodology and got some serious experience with guerrilla user research. We also learned a lot about communicating while tired...very tired...

What's next for You Can STEM

Next, we'd like to build out You Can STEM a little bit more - polish up our images, add some body copy - and get it in front of some real teenage girls to see what they think. We'd also like to do some usability testing and iteration and see what we end up with!