Congratulations to all the Google Summer of Code students whose proposals got accepted this year!!

I just came across this WordPress blogpost congratulating their Google Summer of Code 2009 students.  And at the very bottom, Jane Wells, the author, asks: “Where are all the geek girls?” I’m sure this isn’t a surprise to anybody, but what is surprising is the fact that the number of GSoC applicants went down this year.  This is disappointing, since a lot of us are really trying to get the word out.  Just looking at the University of Toronto for example, we’ve held many info sessions for GSoC 2009.  We even had threads on our department bulletin board answering any questions students might have regarding GSoC.  And I’m sure we’re not the only ones promoting it, so I personally found this very surprising — at first at least. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, James and I spent most of the day at Bayview Secondary School.  We were there on behalf of the Department of Computer Science, and our main job was to educate the high school students about what exactly computer science is, and what kind of experience they can get at the University of Toronto.

We presented to four different classes, two of which were computer science classes, and the rest were computer engineering classes.  The students ranged from grade 10 to grade 12.  So James and I had to make slight changes to the content of our presentation to suit each class and grade.  Overall, the presentations went very well, but both James and I were so familiar with our presentation by the end of the day, we could no longer tell whether or not it was as informative as we wanted it to be.  But I hope that we still got our main messages across.

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Yesterday was another busy day at the University of Toronto.  The Department of Computer Science hosts a ShowCaSe competition every year, and I got a chance to volunteer at this year’s event.  The competition is essentially a chance for high school students to demo projects that they’ve done at school.  Things ranged from games the students programmed, to things like attaching a webcam to remote control cars.  All of the ambassadors and faculty members were amazed at the work done by these high school students!  I wish I had more time to play around with these projects, but I had to give Bahen tours.  But congratulations to the winners once again!  I’m sure they’ll have an awesome time at AutoDesk!

In addition to the ShowCaSe competition that was held in the morning, the Department of Computer Science also had an Open House in the afternoon.  This Open House was slightly different than the March Break Open House we had a few weeks ago.  Read the rest of this entry »