That’s what Komal Singh, program manager in engineering at Google, remembers her four-year-old daughter telling her before deciding to write a children’s book about a girl who loves STEM.
Men make up 75 percent of the STEM workforce. Now Singh is encouraging girls — specifically girls of color, to dive into the fields of STEM with her new book and passion project Ara the Star Engineer.
Singh partnered with other women in Google to write and develop the new book. The senior director of technical program management, Kripa Krishnan; the engineering director, Parisa Tabriz; Google fellow, Diane Tang; and the vice president, Marian Croak–are all featured in and helped Komal author the book. Ipek Konak also assisted by working on illustrations.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
