The 2009-2010 session of MAGIC at the Girls' Middle School (GMS) concluded this month. Each of the five MAGIC mentees at GMS gave a short presentation, followed by a demo, of one or more of the projects they worked on with their mentors as part of their MAGIC mentoring sessions. A non-GMS mentee (who was part of the 2nd year of MAGIC mentoring, but not through a school), also presented her work at this event. The presentations included topics such as programs in Scratch and Alice, making a webpage including details of CSS and Flash programming, programs in LEGO, Android programming, Python programming, investigative reports on the Mars rover, how gears work and other engineering topics. Each mentee did a great job of presenting her work!
The audience for this GMS MAGIC event consisted of present and past GMS MAGIC mentees, MAGIC mentors, parents of MAGIC mentees, and school officials including the GMS Head of school, Assistant Head, and the Dean of students.
MAGIC mentoring for the 2009-2010 sessions at Keiller and Eastside are going to continue through summer.
Three members of the MAGIC team - Ira Pramanick, Margot Miller and Pichuan Chang - were interviewed by Suzanne Barnett for the March 2010 edition of Community Balance broadcast on local Bay Area TV Channel KMVT 15. This show is cablecast on Comcast and ATT Uverse at 7:30 pm every Thursday in Cupertino, Los Altos, and Mountain View, CA. This interview is being aired on every Thursday of March 2010.
Three high school girls from Eastside College Preparatory School started in the MAGIC program in the latter half of February. One of the mentees is a senior, and the remaining two are sophomores at Eastside. Eastside is the first school where MAGIC is being offered to high school students. The other two MAGIC partner schools, GMS and Keiller, are both middle schools, whereas Eastside has both a middle school and a high school. Two other high schoolers have participated in MAGIC - one in the 2008-2009 session and the second one in the current session (2009-2010) - and these two mentee participations have been established through direct contact with the mentees vs through their schools.
MAGIC has been working for the past few months to expand its mentoring to a second school. The MAGIC program kicked off to a great start at this second school, with the first mentor-mentee pair meeting over the phone during the first week of December. The school is the Keiller Leadership Academy in San Diego. During this session, MAGIC mentoring is being offered to three mentees. The mentoring will run through most of the school year, ending in May 2010. The MAGIC program at Keiller is notable in that each of the mentors is going to be remote. Weekly mentoring will take place through a combination of phone calls, video chats, sharing of online docs, and emails. Some of the MAGIC mentoring at GMS has also been remote, this year and last. Remote mentoring presents many learning opportunities not only to the MAGIC core team, but also to both the mentors and the mentees.
Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation has become our first corporate sponsor. We look forward to having more sponsors in the future.
The second MAGIC session is off to a good start at The Girls' Middle School. MAGIC mentoring is being offered to five mentees this year at GMS, these mentees being from the sixth and seventh grades. MAGIC is also going to partner with two other schools in the next few months in San Diego and in the Bay Area respectively. Please stay tuned for additional information regarding these partnerships.
Four middle-schoolers (Cassiel Moroney, Holly Nguyen, Julia Goldman and Smriti Pramanick), a MAGIC mentor (Anjalee Sujanani) and a MAGIC core team member (Foz Saeed) participated as panelists in the MAGIC panel held on October 1st at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The young girls were from The Girls' Middle School (GMS) in Mountain View, CA, and represented the MAGIC mentees from the first MAGIC pilot, held at GMS. The panel was coordinated by Ira Pramanick, founder of MAGIC and a MAGIC core team member. Slides from the panel can be found at the Grace Hopper wiki site.
The panel was a great success, initiating exciting questions and comments from the large audience. Several potential partnership opportunities surfaced from panel follow-on discussions, and MAGIC is looking forward to these future collaborations.
Needless to say, the girls were the youngest (and possibly most sought after) attendees and were encouraged with several giveaways from different booths.
Third year in a row, work on MAGIC is going to be presented at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC). This year, the format is a panel, and the topic is "MAGICal Learnings from 1-1 Mentoring of Middle School Girls". As the name suggests, the panel is about findings and experiences from the first MAGIC pilot, from the perspectives of the MAGIC team, the mentors and mentees. This pilotwas conducted at The Girls' Middle School. The panelists will include representatives of all three, and we hope to have some teachers and parents in the audience! This panel is scheduled in Session One (10:00am-11:00am) on October 1st. It is a Steering Committee Recommendation Track panel! More details about the GHC 2009 program can be found in the Conference Program Schedule. A summary report on the GMS-MAGIC pilot is available here.
MAGIC's first pilot, with the Girls' Middle School concluded at the end of May 2009. At the final MAGIC meeting of the school year, conducted at the school, each of the mentees gave a 5-10 minute presentation and/or demonstration of the work they had done with their mentors during the pilot. This included projects, reports and computer programs. The audience consisted of parents, mentors and teachers. A pilot report will be posted on this site by the end of September 2009.
MAGIC has been featured in the December 2008 IEEE Spectrum article The EE Gender Gap Is Widening In this article, Erico Guizzo discusses the underwhelming participation of women in electrical engineering. He then goes on to talk about various efforts underway to address this issue, directly or indirectly. MAGIC is mentioned as one of two programs aiming to establish a "direct and durable connection between young women and EE professionals."
MAGIC has been incorporated as a nonprofit public benefit corporation in the State of California. The name of the corporation is GetMagic Corporation. The entire NPO related process is being done by WSGR, a leading technology law firm based in Palo Alto, California, on a pro-bono basis. The MAGIC team is deeply indebted to these wonderful folks at WSGR for this service, and for their guidance and help in related matters!
MAGIC kicked off its pilot with the Girls' Middle School in October 2008. The pilot has ten mentees from sixth, seventh and eighth grades, and each mentee has been paired with a MAGIC mentor. The pilot will last through the end of the school year. MAGIC is looking forward to defining and refining its processes as a consequence of this pilot!
The MAGIC core team is conducting a BOF session on "Setting Up an Effective Organization to Support Girls" at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This BOF will be held on Friday, October 3rd, from 5:10pm to 6:10pm, in Torreys Peak III. Here are the BOF slides.
The Newsweek article Revenge of the Nerdette from the June 16th, 2008 issue, cites two outreach programs aimed at encouraging girls to think about science and technology careers. MAGIC is one of them!
Second year in a row, a BOF proposal on a MAGICal topic has been accepted at the Grace Hopper Conference. The topic of the BOF is "Setting Up an Effective Organization to Support Girls". This BOF will be held on Friday, October 3rd, from 5:10pm for an hour. More information on this can be found in the Conference Program Schedule.
In the fall of 2008, MAGIC is going to partner with Girls' Middle School of Mountain View, California, to conduct a pilot of the MAGIC program. More information about Girls' Middle School can be found here. You can read all about the MAGIC pilot proposal here.
Following the project kickoff, MAGIC is undertaking the steps necessary to establish itself as a non-profit organization.
The MAGIC project was kicked off at the 2007 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing Conference, which was held at Orlando, Florida, on October 18th., 2007.