CyberGirlz Summit gets girls into tech

More than 100 middle and high school girls recently huddled over laptops at Cal Poly Pomona’s Bronco Student Center, typing furiously. Animated turtles scuttled across screens, leaving square shapes in their wakes.

“Does anybody know what a ‘for loop’ is?” Microsoft Technology Evangelist Christine Matheney asked the crowd. She quickly explained that it’s a programming command that will make the turtles run their path as many times as the girls want. Soon, turtles zoomed around in colorful, calculated spirals as the girls coded their own versions of the popular smartphone game “Flappy Bird.”

This was the first of what educators hope will become an annual CyberGirlz Summit hosted by Cal Poly Pomona’s College of Business Administration’s Center for Information Assurance in partnership with Beyond the Bell, a Los Angeles Unified School District enrichment program.

Throughout the day, students practiced coding and then competed in a virtual game of Capture the Flag led by Michael McGrew, a security engineer at Facebook. The Flying Unicorns, Eleven Heaven and Team 5 took the top three places and were rewarded with a special Facebook coin that read, “Protect the Graph.”

“This got me super competitive. I was so pumped and energized!” said Eleven Heaven’s Jenny Huang, 17.