Last week was about robotics. The girls wired and programmed Arduino robots to perform a variety of tasks based on sensor input. They particularly enjoyed programming the robots to flash LED lights in time to the beat of their favorite songs and join them in a dance party. They programmed in Arduino C. They also had field trips to Amazon Robotics and Fathom Information Design.

This week, the students are learning about the Internet, security, and building web apps using the Django Python Web framework.  They are getting a lot of hands-on experience in debugging!  In our "How the Internet Works" interactive workshop, the students learned about clients, servers, DNS, routers, encryption, firewalls and replication. Each girl played the role of a different node in the network, routing squishy ball "request packets" and stuffed animal "videos" amongst themselves while warding off man-in-the-middle and DDoS attacks.  After this, they toured our NOCC and had Q&A with some of the people who operate our global platform.  They asked lots of great questions.

In addition to meeting weekly with an Akamai mentor, our students got to know some of Akamai's college interns during the past two weeks. We organized a panel discussion and mixer with summer interns, and each girl also got to meet with a female college intern during their mentoring session this week.

Stay tuned for more updates!