This post is about one of my recent, full-blown FAILs. It hit me hard but, like most failures, it ultimately led to a reimagined concept that's light years better than my initial idea.
Tech Career Paths 4 Girls is a four-session program aimed at inspiring 11-13 year-old girls to explore tech careers. I'd crafted the prototype of the "build your own tech career adventure" platform and tested it out; that's session one. The results were unbelievably encouraging. Sessions 2, 3, and 4 are workshops. They kick off with an in-person female role model sharing her tech journey for 10-15 minutes and then dive into a fun, hands-on tech activity. It was a terrific concept, but here's the challenge: I hadn't built a workshop yet 😳
I had many ideas but started with an AI workshop around training an image classification model. I wanted it to be truly hands-on, so I thought, "Let's have the girls take photos of some blocks and then train a model to recognise specific shapes. They can compete to see who can train the most accurate model. Fun, engaging, hands-on." I am a genius 🤓
Time to test it out on my daughter and her friends. That's when it all unravelled 🙊 They began squabbling over taking the photos, fingers kept sneaking into the shots, and one of the girls felt left out, so she started building things with the extra blocks. We didn't even get through half of the content before I had to call it, a FAIL. 👎
I was deflated. But two things that my intense, flashy career has ingrained in me are:
1. Resilience. I've learned to take hits and bounce right back up. Despite this being a deeply personal project, my energy was down for less than an hour.
2. Trust my Brain. Over time, I've realised that many of my problems find solutions when I sleep on them. So, after the workshop flop, I thought, "Meh, a new idea will come to me by morning."
That night, I kicked back with my daughter and husband, and as is our Friday night tradition, we watched an Avengers movie. 🍿🎥
When I woke up the next morning, a fresh idea was born, and it was a good one.
I recalled a conversation with a colleague, Linton Burling, about how iconic it would be if the program could be as memorable as "Healthy Harold" (a puppet giraffe in NSW teaching kids about healthy eating). I also remembered my daughter's remark: "Black Widow is so cool."
I mashed those ideas together with the knowledge that finding clues and solving puzzles is way more fun than following instructions, and voilà, Snow Leopard, the cyber mystery crime-fighting superhero, was born. I even used AI to create her!
Now my workshops revolve around solving a cyber mystery as Snow Leopard. When I explained the concept to Natalie Piucco, she said, "It's like parents hiding vegetables in Bolognese sauce." I hide the tech inside the guise of solving a cyber mystery. How did it test you may ask? You'll just have to wait for the next post!
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