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Hi, I'm Lila, coming at you live from CES, and I am here with...
Jon Gottfried from Major League Hacking.
So John, what does Major League Hacking do?
Yeah, so Major League Hacking is the official student hackathon league—that means that we put
on these invention competitions called hackathons at college and high school campuses
all over the world.
That is very, very cool. What would you do at Major League Hacking?
So I'm one of the founders, so I do a lot of different things:
sometimes I work with our partners, sometimes I help organizers make their
events awesome, sometimes I code myself–it's pretty wide reaching.
What does Major League Hacking do to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers?
Yeah, so, we do a lot of different things. One of the really difficult things about getting
women involved in STEM is that at a very young age
society is telling them that this isn't for them—right—and so when we get to the
college level where we're really working, a big thing that we're doing is taking
people who aren't necessarily thinking about studying CS or engineering and
making these events are welcoming place for them to come learn technology skills.
Right—so it doesn't matter if you've decided that you want to learn this already.
You can come, do it, you can come figure it out, and there'll be mentors
and workshops for you to get off the ground really easily.
So a big part of pursuing a STEM career—and you're obviously in a STEM career—is your role models
as a child. Who would you say inspired you the most
to pursue coding and hacking and hackathons?
You know, it's funny. Both of my parents had sort of technical jobs in one sense
or another. So my mom was a graphic designer, and she started using computers
probably before anyone else in my family to make her work more efficient and
easier and modern, right? And so I saw my parents from a really young age using
technology, using computers—I mean I remember having these, like, huge floppy disks,
which—maybe some of the people watching haven't heard of—but they're
really cool, and you know, I was kind of trying to emulate them, and really get
into it myself. I mean, I remember like just being super interested in what these
crazy devices were, and maybe all they could do—
type and print out, but it was still really cool to me.
That's awesome. So, in closing, what would be some advice for kids who would like to
pursue hacking, coding, computer science?
Totally. So, technology and computer science are probably the most attainable skills
in the world right now. And what I mean by that is that there's tons of free
resources, tons of people out there who want to help you get off the ground, and
so all you really need to do is invest the time, right?
Anyone can do this just by going online, going to a library, getting books,
getting resources and building things. You know, the best way to learn these skills is
just take them and build something that you want to see in the world, and by
doing that you can reach millions and millions of people in a very short
period of time just by creating something that you think is cool.
So that's the best way to start.
Thank you, Jon. Thanks for coming. This is Girl Scouts live from CES.