What My Little Ponies have to do with technology

Terri recently wrote a piece on the Geek Feminism blog that I just had to share:

I was the sort of little girl who had over a hundred My Little Ponies, largely due to my mother’s uncanny ability to find them incredibly cheap at garage sales. With so many, we could put on pony musicals where we wrote or adapted all the music and made costumes out of whatever scraps our parents were willing to lend us. My childhood best friend and I built an entire “computer game” for my little sister to play using ponies as the characters (Gameplay was inspired by our favourite adventure game for PC, Monkey Island. Nowadays, I’d call it a roleplaying game but I didn’t know the terminology then.) We had ponies on the bridge of the Enterprise, and ponies going camping on the very conveniently green-carpeted stairs in my house, and ponies ponies ponies.

Definitely check out the entire post here, and find out what a "brony" is in the process.

14 Year Old Airplane Builder

I came across this video and wanted to share it with you. It's about Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski who is very passionate about planes. She took her first flying lessons at the tender age of 9. By the age of 14 she build her first aircraft and flew it at the age of 16.

Her advice is to never let an opportunity to pass you by.

Girl Develop It Ottawa Kicks Off its New Chapter

One of CU-WISE's original founders, Serena Ngai, recently started a new chapter of an organization called Girl Develop It.  It's all about getting non-technical women in Ottawa to learn how to program.  To me, this has the potential to help blur the line between women in tech and women near tech, which can only be a positive thing.

I recently taught at the chapter's kickoff workshop, where participants learned some basics of programming using Scratch.  You can read all about my experience on my own blog.  I also posted on the new blog for the Ottawa chapter, which I encourage you to follow to keep up to date on future happenings.

If you want to learn how to program or just meet a bunch of ladies who are trying it for the first time, be sure to join the Girl Develop It Ottawa Meetup Page!