Yesterday, Camille, myself and TUNE House scholars, Aishwarya and Aishwarya (talk about confusing the students!) visited a group of female middle school students as part of our TUNE House Roadshow. On Monday, we were told there were 35 students signed up, and by the morning of the visit, there were over 70 girls on the list who had voluntarily signed up (our biggest audience yet!). We were told we needed to move from a classroom to the theater in order to accommodate the numbers.
We handed out TUNE sunglasses to everyone who asked a question, but in the end, we found those weren’t even necessary because the students had SO many great questions! In the hour of our visit, there was not a single moment where there weren’t at least 5+ hands raised.
At the beginning of the roadshow, we always ask the students, by show of hands, “how many of you have taken a computer science or tech-related class?” and we’ve come to find that number is usually below 50%.
Camille and I then ask the girls “after hearing from the TUNE House scholars and how great it is/how much opportunity there is working as a software engineer….how many of you are now going to register or continue taking tech classes?”(These visits are planned around class registration, and once registration has concluded, we follow-up with the teacher and report how many students actually registered for a tech class).
Our goal is that 100% of the students will register for a tech-related class the following semester. Yesterday, 99% of the hands were raised!
In addition, we had them fill out a survey at the end and asked what they enjoyed most about the roadshow…
I really liked the interview with the college students. They had a lot of cool things to say and they definitely inspired me – Lucy – 7th grader
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