Estee Lauder Sponsors STEM Contest
TradingScreen Inc. and The MIT Enterprise Forum of New York have announced the launch of the second annual award-winning "Dream it. Code it. Win it." contest. The student coding competition rewards and promotes creativity, diversity and literacy in the field of computer science.
Georgia Garinois-Melenikiotou, EVP of Corporate Marketing at Este Lauder, who is sponsoring the women's prize says, "The gender gap in STEM is especially troubling as half of our population is being overlooked. Women today make up a majority of college students, but they are severely underrepresented in the field. The biggest problem facing women and engineering — and STEM in general — is getting more women into the pipeline. Resolving this problem requires us to transform some of the perceptions that remain embedded in our society. That's why competitions like this are so important. Innovators have the power to do more than make our jobs easier. They can change the way we think and eliminate preconceived notions that were once the norm."
The Competition
Dream it. Code it. Win it. is different from traditional competitions or hackathons, which focus on coding. The contest is judged on the quality of the problem being tackled as well as the solution. The first Dream it. Code it. Win it. competition in 2014 achieved a 50% female participation rate and enabled four teams to launch their own companies.
Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab and Chair of the Code-to-Learn Foundation, will serve on the panel. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the Media Lab collaborated with the LEGO Company on the Mindstorms and WeDo robotics kits. It developed the Scratch programming software and online community, where young people around the world have created and shared nearly eight million interactive projects.
Students attending accredited high schools and colleges will be able to compete for cash and prizes through an online submission until midnight on March 29, 2015. The final awards ceremony will be hosted by The Cooper Union at the historic Great Hall in New York on the evening of April 30th. Visit dreamitcodeitwinit.org for more information.
Georgia Garinois-Melenikiotou, EVP of Corporate Marketing at Este Lauder, who is sponsoring the women's prize says, "The gender gap in STEM is especially troubling as half of our population is being overlooked. Women today make up a majority of college students, but they are severely underrepresented in the field. The biggest problem facing women and engineering — and STEM in general — is getting more women into the pipeline. Resolving this problem requires us to transform some of the perceptions that remain embedded in our society. That's why competitions like this are so important. Innovators have the power to do more than make our jobs easier. They can change the way we think and eliminate preconceived notions that were once the norm."
The Competition
Dream it. Code it. Win it. is different from traditional competitions or hackathons, which focus on coding. The contest is judged on the quality of the problem being tackled as well as the solution. The first Dream it. Code it. Win it. competition in 2014 achieved a 50% female participation rate and enabled four teams to launch their own companies.
Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab and Chair of the Code-to-Learn Foundation, will serve on the panel. His Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the Media Lab collaborated with the LEGO Company on the Mindstorms and WeDo robotics kits. It developed the Scratch programming software and online community, where young people around the world have created and shared nearly eight million interactive projects.
Students attending accredited high schools and colleges will be able to compete for cash and prizes through an online submission until midnight on March 29, 2015. The final awards ceremony will be hosted by The Cooper Union at the historic Great Hall in New York on the evening of April 30th. Visit dreamitcodeitwinit.org for more information.