STEM Shadow - Team 8

Inspiration

When reflecting on how we ourselves got into the STEM industry, a common topic brought up was how having a mentor or just a female to look up to in STEM in general helped us a lot in encouraging us to join. To build on this idea, we decided to design a project that brought together mentors and mentees from around to world to encourage more women and girls to join the industry.

What it does

STEM Shadow is a virtual job shadowing software in which mentees are paired up with mentors in the STEM industry, Some additional features include video calling and chatting platforms, badges and virtual points, and additional workshops and courses to help introduce mentees to STEM concepts. All of these features are made to help inspire passion in STEM.

How we built it

We first wanted to design a website and the most efficient method to go about this was using Wix.com. We also wanted to create a visual representation of the GUI of our app, so we decided to use the the website Fignma introduced to us today. There a slight challenge.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into while creating our project was never using the Figma environment before. We overcame this by trail and error and a bit of googling, and it ended up being a very fun process. We also had trouble deciding what coding languages to use in the development of our website and application. We overcame this by referring back to the workshops as they the optimal languages for browsers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of learning how to use two different development environments which we all didn't have much previous experiences with beforehand. We are also proud of attending and participating in our first Hackathon

What we learned

During our experience of the entire event, attending the mandatory workshops, and etc. We learned many things. During the introduction to the event we learned about the Phases of Design Thinking, where we first analyze the end users/our target audience by empathizing, then define their problem, ideate, and finally create a prototype. During the workshops we learnt about the many resources that are available to us online such as wireframes like Figma and React,tools like Chaktra, and GitHub.

What's next for STEM Shadow

Next for STEM Shadow, we aim to create workshops and other in person events to encourage more engagement. We also aim to expand to other minority groups, such as Indigenous peoples and LGBTQ peoples.

Team Number 18 Video in different area