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Moira is the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs, an edutech startup that brings together learning through gaming!

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Show Notes:

• Taken Charge Game | Galvanize Labs
• Galvanize Labs, Inc | Because Progress Requires Action
• Moira Hardek (@mohardek) | Twitter
• Galvanize Labs (@GalvanizeLabs) | Twitter
• Taken Charge Honored as First Online Game to Earn ISTE Seal of Alignment

• Women In Tech: The Book | WTR 14 | Jupiter Broadcasting

• Support Women’s Tech Radio

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below:

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I”m Angela.
PAIGE: Angela, today we interviewed a good friend of mine, Moira Hardek, and she is the CEO and President, sole founder, of Galvanized Labs, and they’re a edutech startup. She kind of gives us the lowdown on what that means, and what that looks like, and kind of how she’s using her experiencing in gaming to bring technology and education together.
ANGELA: And into gaming, because it’s technology and education in games.
PAIGE: Yeah, its’ crazy. It’s like this awesome hybrid mashup that she goes on to kind of explain what that means. It’s a really neat interview, I think.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I’d like to mention Digital Ocean. If you go to digitalocen.com and use the promo code heywtr, you can save on simple cloud hosting, dedicated to offering the most intuative and easy way to spin up a cloud server. You can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, and pricing plans start at only $5.00 a month. That’s 512 megabytes of RAM, 20 gigabytes SSD, One CPU, and one terabyte transfer. Digital Ocean has date center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. The interface is incredibly simple, intuitive. The control panel is awesome. It will help you design exactly what you need, which empowers users to replicate on large scales with the company’s straightforward API. Check out digitialocen.com by using promo code heywtr.
PAIGE: And we got started with our interview today by asking Moira to explain her role in technology.
MOIRA: I’m the President and CEO of Galvanize Labs. We are a hybrid tech company at the moment. What we’re working on is ed tech, so educational gaming and technology education. My role is a little bit of everything. In startups, in small companies, it’s kind of everything from the business side to the tech side, the design side. I get to do a little bit of everything, which is probably really good for me. It keeps me excited. It keeps me interested, and it’s certainly never boring,. It’s kind of broad, but also really exciting.
PAIGE: What is a hybrid technology company?
MOIRA: I like to think of it as a hybrid, because we’re focusing on education and we have such a strong emphasis and validating the educational side of what we’re doing. Not just throwing out the term of, hey this is an educational product. We really want to be accredited and validate that educational status. So, we’re kind of half an educational company and the other half of it is a gaming studio. Everything to do within the game is all in house. Nothing is third party. Nothing is purchased. We do everything inside. So, everything from soundtracks to all the digital assets, to the game design, to the voices is all in house. That’s where I kind of feel the hybrid is. It’s great educational emphasis and then this fun game studio.
PAIGE: Has it been a challenge to kind of combine those two worlds? I mean, you don’t typically think of education and gaming at all.
MOIRA: It has been really interesting, because I just don’t think it’s been done in this way before. You really do have these two totally separate industries of gaming, which is so much more classically identified as entertainment. You know, I think of, game releases now are almost like movie release weekends and billion dollar release weekends. It’s entertainment and it’s really what it does so well. Education is obviously kind of almost the flip side of that. Not to say that education isn’t fascinating, but you certainly don’t see, you know, a billion dollar education weekend. And so, as far as how the money flows and how the tech works, it’s entirely different. So, when you try to put educational gaming together, you don’t see gaming classically as an industry really turning its considerable talent towards the education industry, because it just doesn’t have the same type of return. That leaves education a little bit off on an island, that although gaming is a really powerful tool that can be utilized within education, they really don’t get to use the great talant of the gaming industry. And so, that leaves educators to kind of self-educate when it comes to gaming. So, gaming inside of education, or edugaming, which that’s always a great term, has been a little bit lackluster, because it doesn’t bring this entertainment quality. Kids today, I mean, I like to call them the 3DS generation. They’re the first one, if you give them a crappy game, they’re going to tell you this is a crappy game. When they’re used to things like Battlefield and Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft. Visually stunning games with tremendous dynamics that keep them really engaged. Edugaming really can’t compete. What we really wanted to bring to this was a level of entertainment quality gaming with real educational validation. And that was a challenge. We really kind of were able to pull that off for the first time. We live in between these two worlds, and yet we don’t wholey belong to one or the other. There’s pros and cons to that.
PAIGE: Always, whenever you’re bridging a gap it’s always strengths and weaknesses.
MOIRA: Right. Yeah, first to market, again there’s bonuses and there’s drawbacks.
PAIGE: So you do everything in house. What kind of tools do you use to do that for education for gaming?
MOIRA: Oh my god, we do. I feel like there’s a little bit of, just, everything. The game and built and designed entirely from the unity engine. So, obviously, we do a lot of work in unity. All of the web interfaces. All of your guy’s favorite stuff from node to angular to the tremendous list of the custom APIs that we create. The game is hosted within Amazon, right, so AWS, and god bless them for that. And there’s just there’s so many little pieces that we’re able to put together and custom design. Half of the time that we spent building the original platform for launch, before we actually built the game, we built proprietary tools that we were going to use to build the game, and make production even easier going forward. So, the custom scripting system that we were able to create. All of the techs and all the interaction that you see in the game isn’t actually hard coded into the game. It’s actually all dynamically being pulled through our custom scripting system. And so, for our writers and our game designers, we actually have a web portal where now when we write scripts for games going forward, is we’re actually just — when we create those storyboards and write those scripts, we’re dropping the scripts into a web portal that’s then dynamically being pulled into the game when the game is hard coded. So, it’s great tools like that. We have an in-game currency that’s called jewels. It’s like gold coins in Mario Bros or rings in Sonic. To make, again, production much more efficient, instead of hardcoding exactly where those little pieces of currency are going to be in every level, we have a custom coordinate and mapping system. So, again, it’s on the back end. We get to go in this great little web portal that we’ve created and drop the coordinates for where these are going to go, instead of hardcoding in the game where they are. That just gives us a lot of freedom. So we can change levels, and we change maps, and we can build new things, and keep the game and the future games really dynamic and updated for the kids. So, it’s a great experience for our users. So, from the game itself to the tools we’ve created to make production more dynamic, there’s so much stuff that we’re using, and a lot of stuff that we’re creating on our own.
ANGELA: What is your target age?
MOIRA: The age range is remarkably large, because of the type of content that we’re offering. I kind of like to call the beginning platforms — right now, Taken Charge is a serious of four games that are played sequentially, and then we actually have three games that are about to kind of roll off the production line, and then we have 30 more that are currently up on the storyboard that are in production. The first, beginning part of our platform, I like to call as b.c. it’s before coding. So, its’ fundamentals, right. Its’ really getting kids to kind of work up into coding and those advanced topics. Because we’re talking about these fundamentals, that actually gives us a tremendously large age range. The only thing that you need to play Taken Charge is a third grade reading level, and a browser, and an internet connection. So, I have kids playing this that are from third grades to — we just completed a really fun pilot, actually here at a Chicago high school, and it was freshman, sophomores, and juniors in high school that were playing it. So, its’ really all about what level of knowledge the user or the player has, or in this case doesn’t have. And a lot of students in American are lacking these technology fundamentals. And then gaming, being this great universal language, can speak to a large range of audiences. So, the exact same game is just as fun and interactive for elementary school kids as it is for high schoolers. It kind of has that Minecraft effect, right?
ANGELA: Yes.
MOIRA: You know, ten years old playing Minecraft, and then very popular in the 55 plus market too, it’s tremendous.
ANGELA: Right. Where do you see the kids going after they use your product? Are you planning to develop something after that for more advanced? What is your vision on where they go after?
MOIRA: There’s kind of multiple ways to look at it. Obviously, the company being as young as it is, we are building extended platforms. So there are, again, three games coming and there’s 30 more games to come. So, this will be quite a large marketplace of options and of topics. It all begins to get more advanced. So, we’re all kind of about this progressive learning model and being able to progress kids through technology as a subject. Because, I feel like, technology is always kind of treated as this one off when it’s addressed educationally, and we certainly don’t do that math, right? And you always see, like, let’s throw kids into coding. Because coding and robotics, those are really sexy technology topics. And those are great, great, great topics. But when we teach kids math in school, when they have no background in math, we don’t start them in long division. We go back and start with addition and subtraction and multiplication. And then we move them forward. We make sure that they grasp these topics so that they don’t get frustrated, they walk way. When we teach kids technology, we’re throwing them to coding and there’s this huge assumption that they have this underlying knowledge, when I’ve got the benefit of working with kids hands on for the last decade. Ninety percent of the kids that we work with don’t know where a file goes when you download it through a browser. But we’re like, (unintelligible) go to coding. So, what we really want to do is build this progressive model, have them move forward. So, yeah, our platform will move into things like coding. It doesn’t move into things like 3D modeling and different stuff like that, so yeah, there are those options. We partner with a lot of youth development organizations that offer, again, more advanced programs. And we’re also kind of working with, now, other types of technical sites that are a little bit more adult driven. That, if you can get this really solid, kind of, base line in your younger years, then why couldn’t you go into — think of what’s out there in tech ed for adults. And things like Linda and portal site, and all those great educational sites that you can continue your own education online. So, there’s so many places to go after this, once you establish this great baseline. So, we’re working in a lot of different arenas to see where you can go.
PAIGE: Have you always been involved in gaming? Did you start out as a game developer or anything like that?
MOIRA: No, certainly not. I mean, I’ve always had an interest in games dynamics. I’ve always applied them in a lot of the work I’ve done. And game design as pure game design, was something that kind of came later. It really kind of came in the second half of my career and the decade that I spent at Best Buy. It really came for me when I really was able to recognize what a powerful tool gaming was going to be, and it could be in that educational realm. I had just had a particular passion point around teaching, and particularly in the youth market. Gaming just seemed to be at the center of that for me. Immediately, I think, kind of any other entrepreneur, I just looked at gaming and what it could be and was urked that — my point was view was, we’re not doing it right. I wanted to do something different with it. I had to get involved. So, gaming came much later for me.
PAIGE: So, you’re been a lifelong gamer yourself. What are some of your favorites?
MOIRA: I go all the way back to my Apple IIe when I was younger. I totally just dated myself and gave away how old I am. That’s fine. I still play like mod of number munchers from when I was a kid, because that’s all we had when we were in school. So games like that. And then Day of Tentacle I felt was really great. I still have the original box too, it’s one of my prized possessions. For me though, really, really advanced gaming. I have told this story a million times. It was the very first Civilization by Sid Meier when i was Civ, and that really pushed me over the top into my love of gaming. I really kind of like this closeted gamer in college, because I didn’t know any other girl that gamed. So, yeah, I always hung out with the geeky guys, because I worked at the student union, and they introduced me to Counter Strike and things like that. It’s been this really slow progression. I was really kind of an isolated individual gamer until after I got out of college. Then, when you go to work for a company like Best Buy, that sells games and consoles. the addiction got out of control from there.
PAIGE: I had a very similar experience. I got into games a little bit in high school and then (unintelligible) Civilization, definitely one of those. And the Sims.
ANGELA: Yeah, I never did do Sims.
PAIGE: I had to actually — I had a burned copy back in the day of the Sims and my freshman year I had to take it out of my drive during finals week and literally break it in half so that I would pass my finals and stop playing the Sims.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh.
MOIRA: Yeah, see. I think it still is. I believe it is still like the number one game for women. I believe it is still sitting out there as the number one game for women.
PAIGE: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
ANGELA: I got into Minecraft in 2011, I think. And I really like it. Now, I’m playing it with my son and that’s really fun, but I did Battlefield 1942 and some of the other first-person shooters. And it was my husband and me and his friends. No other women, but it was great.
PAIGE: It’s one of my geek cards of shame that I’m epically bad at first-person shooters.
ANGELA: Oh, I am epically good.
PAIGE: Really?
ANGELA: They call me hidden angerz.
PAIGE: Oh man, that’s awesome.
ANGELA: Yes. Yes, I’m a sniper.
MOIRA: Very nice. I am epically mediocre.
PAIGE: Well, we run the gamut now.
ANGELA: Yeah, all three of us.
MOIRA: I can at least hold my own and not be at the bottom of it, but if I go to talk trash, then I totally get rocked. And so I’m just kind of somewhere in the middle. It Sim games that just dominated me. So like SImcity, that was the one that I had to get rid of, because I was going to never have a social live again with Simcity. And then, I was one of those that was so depressed when Simcity came out, you know, with EA last year, and it was so bad. But now, thank you Skylines, is amazing. And if you haven’t played that yet, do it. I’m afraid it’s going to very, very negatively impact Galvanize right now.
ANGELA: You know, in the same way that I’ve avoided Pinterest, I avoided Sims. Because I would get consumed. I have chosen not to do that, intentionally.
MOIRA: Don’t avoid Pinterest, it’s so good.
ANGELA: No, you know what, I use Instructables. It’s way better, because they actually show how to do it, right there. You don’t have to click on somebody’s blog so they can get ad revenue, or wonder, just because they didn’t put any link on how to do things. Instructables is way better. I tried to get into console games, like Donkey Kong I really liked on Super Nintendo. But Poker Smash on XBox is amazing.
MOIRA: I’ll have to look at it.
PAIGE: Like Poker, the card game?
ANGELA: Yes. And it’s like Tetris, but with poker. You match poker hands to clear lines.
PAIGE: Whoa.
ANGELA: It’s really cool. You go up levels. There’s different music, I just love it. Anyway.
MOIRA: This is it. Gaming is just universal. And this is why it’s just so, so powerful as a tool. This is why.
ANGELA: Yep.
PAIGE: I’m a competitive Tetris junkie. I like it. A lot of people are like, I”m really good at Tetris. I’m like, you don’t understand, competitive Tetris is different. Where you send lines to each other and stuff.
ANGELA: Do you have the Tetris lamp from ThinkGeek?
PAIGE: No, but I should.
ANGELA: Yeah.
MOIRA: Clearly.
ANGELA: I can’t find the power brick. The straight — it’s the straight brick. I can’t find it, but I have all the other ones.
MOIRA: I bet you anything it doesn’t exist, because like in the game, it’s never there when you need it.
ANGELA: Yeah, I have real life Tetris in my house with that lamp.
MOIRA: So, ThinkGeek didn’t actually ever create one, just to give you the same level of frustration that the game does.
ANGELA: No, I did — it did — I did have it. I have three kids and one of them took off with it somewhere and it is somewhere else in the house.
MOIRA: Your kids also are functioning completely the way the game Tetris does. That’s fantastic.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: Somebody has made off with my ilen piece. Where is it?
ANGELA: Yep.
MOIRA: So awesome.
PAIGE: So, you’re the CEO of your own company now?
MOIRA: Yep.
PAIGE: And having done that, and having been in the gaming space as a woman, have you been able to find other women to work with in your company? Other women gamers? How is that working?
MOIRA: I mean, I will definitely say, obviously there is women at Galvanize. I won’t overplay that, that I went out and went on some big search for women and everything, because quite honestly, my team and I have been together for a long time. We’ve worked together at previous companies. So, sadly that wasn’t this big recruiting coo. And I haven’t expanded the company incredibly. We’ve stayed in a very, very lean model as we’ve gone on to do this. You know, kind of going to Reddit way and staying real lean, so I haven’t done a lot of that. But, from a networking standpoint, it’s hard. I don’t see — I don’t come across a ton of other female startups in this genre. Certainly not, kind of, in gaming, and not locally. I think I mentioned I was on a Skype call last week, and that happened to be a female game designer and she was up in Canada. But the two worlds were completely different. Being on the business side here, right, and we’re monetizing the game. There’s is more kind of social game and kind of grant based. That kind of stuff. So, those were two a little bit different worlds that we lived in. Gaming is still, obviously very, very male dominated. I still get bathrooms to myself at PAX and GDC. And you guys know how that goes. I don’t come across a lot of that. What has been, I think, a little bit different for me is because of how we started the company, the fact that it was kind of bootstrap and angel funded, I didn’t do things like Y-combinator or Sim Connector, or kind of any of those incubators to kind of get this started. I went a different path. And then we moved right into a revenue model. I was networked a little bit differently. I didn’t have access to a ton of that stuff. It has been a little bit isolating. And that’s been not the greatest feeling in the world.
PAIGE: So, if other women are kind of out there with a big idea, and kind of some cohones to make it happen, it’s always sad to me that there aren’t more women out taking risks. What would you say to someone who’s got an idea and wants to try to be an entrepreneur?
MOIRA: Take a risk. I don’t see why not. I really — I don’t see any difference in a woman taking the risk than a man taking the risks, and the startups that they have. Quite honestly, my favorite kind of part of it is always strength in numbers. I don’t think it should be one or two female entrepreneurs at a time. I think we should be doing this in big groups and big numbers. Are there special challenges for us? I think, yeah. That certainly can be the case. But I also think women have a really, very particular point of view. I think it’s very powerful. The way that women look differently at how to solve problems. I think in the world and the way the marketplace today, I think the woman’s point of view is very, very powerful. And I’d love to see that out there way more than it is. The very simple answer to that is, yeah get out there and do it. I don’t see any reason why not. The same risk is involved. It is, it’s scary. I think my dad says it best. It kind of feels like you’re trying to thread a needle while jumping out of an airplane. It feels like that for everybody, no matter what gender you ar.
PAIGE: The diverse thinking is so important. We had an interview with Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack, and she’s a CEO of Fresh Mint and has done a lot of work in the tech space as a woman entrepreneur. And she’s like, it’s not even just women. It’s just getting a group together that doesn’t all think the same way. You can have a diverse group of all different colors of the rainbow; all different genders, all different sexualities, and put them in a room. If they’re all Harvard grads, they still all think the same.
MOIRA: That’s true.
PAIGE: Diverse thinking is more than just gender, but gender is a huge piece of that.
MOIRA: Agreed. Agreed. I’m a very, very big advocate of that. I think you see it all the time. I am members of different women’s groups and I can’t help but see it in a lot of different scenarios that I’ve put in, and these very stark differences. And I think that point of view is just so powerful, and I really want to see that voice and that point of view come to the forefront a lot more.
PAIGE: If there was one piece of advice you could give someone who is about to get started, what would you say?
MOIRA: I think is one I give every time I hear this one, and it’s so true. It’s just, don’t do it alone. I think there are a lot of people out there that think that when you do this and the startup culture is — it’s kind of either one of two things. Either you already have to be incredibly well-networked, and if I’m not then I can’t do this. And that’s not true. And the other side of it is, I have to have all the answers. I can’t do this if I don’t have all the answers. There’s this kind of misconception of I’m doing this alone. You’re not. You’re never actually really doing it alone and don’t try to do it alone. You don’t have to have all the answers. Don’t try to be the lone ranger on this. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to bring other people in. It’s better to do it that way. It is scary, but it’s not scary for the reasons that you think it’s scary. Scary comes later, but don’t do it alone.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget, you can contact us by going to jupiterbroadcasting.com. There is a contact form. You can also do the show drop down to find all the Women’s Tech Radio shows, and find the show notes for each of the shows with tons of links and resources.
PAIGE: You can also check us out on iTunes, where you can subscribe to the podcast. Or, if you’d rather use the RSS feed, that’s available on the Jupiter Broadcasting site. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Or, you can check out our tumblr that has all of the transcripts of the past shows at heywtr.tumblr.com. And if you have a minute, shoot us an email. Leave us some feedback wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

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Live from LFNW Andrea Frost discusses how she went from being a firefighter in Alaska to a computer science major.

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Email Andrea Frost andreafrost@hotmail.com

• Association for Women in Computing
• Whatcom Robotics Expo on Facebook
• littleBits Electronics
• Creator Girls on Facebook
• Creator Girls on Twitter
• Code Lily Code School

Full transcription of previous episodes can be found below or also at heywtr.tumblr.com

• Support Women’s Tech Radio

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they are successful in technology. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I”m Angela. Are you sure about that Paige?
PAIGE: Today I’m not. It’s been a long day at the conference here.
ANGELA: Yes.
PAIGE: So, we are live here at Linux Fest Northwest. And we got to pull some awesome people off the floor to do interviews today, and our first interview is Andrea Frost. Andrea is a current computer science major. She is getting her Master’s in Computer Science and she gets to talk to us today about robotics, and education, and community building, and a whole bunch of awesome issues that we just dove into.
ANGELA: And before we get into the interview, I want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio and the Jupiter Broadcasting Network by going to patreon.com/jupitersignal. You can donate as little as $3.00 a month or whatever amount you want. There’s a swag level where you get free stuff in the mail, or you can just ,like I said, do $3.00 a month. But either way, it’s a giant bucket. It funds all the shows on the network, and specially Women’s Tech Radio, it keeps us going. And now we will get into the interview.
PAIGE: Yeah, so we started today by asking Andrea what she is into in technology right now.
So, welcome to Women’s Tech Radio. I’m Paige
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: And we’re here live at Linux Fest Northwest and we have an awesome guest joining us, and she’ll take a moment to introduce herself.
ANDREA: Hi, I’m Andrea Frost. I’m getting a Master’s in Computer Science at Western Washington University, and an active member of the WWU Association for Women in Computing.
PAIGE: Awesome. Andrea is joining us to tell us about some of her work as a student, and also her work with getting women involved in technology.
ANGELA: Extensive work in community building and getting more women in technology.
PAIGE: Yeah, we found her on the show floor, or she found us, or a little of both, and we’re just super excited to talk to you. So, could you tell us a little bit about what you’re up to for the community?
ANDREA: Sure, there’s a lot of things, so I’ll try to keep it short. More recently, or coming up pretty soon we’re doing and open source day on May 9th. So, basically what we’re doing is, we’re just trying to expose people to what open source is, and how do you find a project, how do you contribute. So, we’re still looking for mentors and sponsorship. But the event, there’s like 100 people coming. So, that’s super exciting. And then we’re also doing –
PAIGE: Hold on. Okay, May 9th, where?
ANDREA: Yes, May 9th at Western Washington University in the Viking Union 565. It’s the fifth floor.
PAIGE: Okay, how do people find out to volunteer or anything like that?
ANDREA: Well, you can email — can I give my personal email?
PAIGE: If you want to.
ANGELA: Yeah.
ANDREA: Okay, so my email is andreafrost@hotmail.com You can also look us up online, the Association for Women in Computing, and just do WWAWC and then you’ll find our website and there’s contact info there as well.
PAIGE: Awesome. So, they contact you via the Association for Women in Computing?
ANDREA: That’s right.
ANGELA: Cool, so that’s your first thing, and what’s your next thing?
ANDREA: The next thing is that I’m also cofounding a startup in Bellingham, which is a code school called Code Lily. This summer we’re going to be hosting a Whatcom Robotics Expo in cooperation with Western and the Association for Women in Computing, and all of the other robotics related groups. We’re going to bring everyone together under one roof and create that road map so that people can, no matter what age your are, you know where you can find other robotics activities and who are the right people to connect with, and connect everyone to each other.
PAIGE: That’s awesome.
ANGELA: And that’s a four-hour, would you consider it a workshop or a lecture?
ANDREA: It’s from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and it’s free. So, you can basically just drop in any time you want. We’re just going to have the room set up in demo style, so all the different groups are going to be demoing something and then they’re also going to have a way for you, the participants to actually be able to dig in with your own hands and build your own robots. There’s some Littlebits. There’s just a lot of different Robotics activities going on in Whatcom county that most people don’t know about. So, it will be both demos, but also workshops where you can get involved. Each group will be speaking a little bit about their group at some point throughout the day.
PAIGE: So, robots is one of your passions?
ANDREA: I love robots. It’s actually kind of a side thing, but it’s just such an accessible way to relate with technology and computer science specifically, because rather than working in a terminal where you can’t really see something happening, persay, with robots you can actually see it light up. You can see it move. You can actually watch the wheels turn. It’s very tangible. Where, I think, when you’re first starting out with computers that can be a big barrier for a lot of people. I just think robots are a really accessible way to get introduced to it all.
PAIGE: I think that’s a lot of the same reason web tech is that same draw, because you put something up and it’s there right away. How did you get started? What got you into it?
ANDREA: Well, I have a German degree from 2003, so I’m a returning student coming back to school. I traveled for most of my 20s and I was a (unintelligible) firefighter in Alaska. I hurt my leg and I couldn’t work on my feet anymore. I was really stuck. I was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do now. I worked at a law office for a couple years and I was really under stimulated there. I felt under valued, under stimulated. I tutored my friend’s daughters in math and decided to go back to school to get a master’s in math to become a math teacher. I saw a pretty big problem just with the stigma around math. I couldn’t believe that so many girls get so far without learning the fundamentals of math and thinking that they suck at math. Or thinking I hate math. Math sucks. Math is in everything we do. Math is so beautiful. It’s in everything we look at in nature. So, I think we as a community need to do a better job of promoting women in science, stem, mathematics, all those things. My quarter back in school I took a computer programing class as a prerequisite for the math degree and I was like, what is that? I don’t know what I”m doing. But I ended up getting an A. I did really well. It just blew me away what we can do with a little bit of code on a screen. You can make tremendous changes in the world. I went to the Grace Hopper Conference a couple years ago and I met women from all over the world who are writing things — a simple cellphone app is changing the lives for millions of people in Turkey and Africa, everywhere. I think, women especially, really bring a social component that I personally believe is a little bit lacking currently. I wish there was more focus on morals and ethics and all that kind of stuff around computing too. I think the more diversity we have in computing, we just as a world, as a people will move in a better direction.
ANGELA: Definitely.
PAIGE: Technology is one of the most powerful tools we have right now, just in general. Diverse thinking is only going to make that better.
ANDREA: Absolutely.
PAIGE: And used in a more responsible manner.
ANDREA: Absolutely. Yeah, so diverse teams are basically essential. If you look at a standard computer science class you’re not going to see that many women. Our club is very, very focused on building, not necessarily tutoring each other or helping with homework, but just building community and support so that if we have a hard assignment or have a bad day, it’s like okay lets commiserate about that and then move forward. Where without that community and friendship, and being able to smile at each other in the halls. Things that are very simple, a lot of people without that just tend to give up for feel like they don’t belong there. What we do with our club has really changed a lot of lives. Especially the outreach that we do with kids in our community. It’s just really changing the whole direction of who is in involved in technology and what we can do with it.
ANGELA: What associations do you belong to that help support this?
ANDREA: Most recently we have the Creators and Innovators Club for GIrls, CICE for short. That is a pilot program started this year in Bellingham School District. We thought we we would have 15 girls or so, and we ended up having 57.
PAIGE: Oh my goodness.
ANGELA: Which is amazing.
ANDREA: It is amazing, but we don’t have enough robots for that many people. And we didn’t get enough funding for that many robots. It’s a really good problem to have, but that’s just been amazing watching these girls, or young women. We use Littlebits so they learn about — an accessible way to learn about circuitry and they’ve built their own robots. We did sewable circuits, so like LEDs into clothing. ANd we did NXT robots. All those things. The transformation we’ve seen in them with this program is phenomenal. Next year, we need to expand to four more schools. That is just amazing. So, we need more mentors. We need more funding, but it’s incredible.
PAIGE: Those are great problems to have. That’s awesome. Are you open sourcing your curriculum?
ANDREA: That’s up for debate right now. Mainly because of the fact that we’re having trouble funding these projects. I personally want everything to be open source, more or less, but it also could be potentially an opportunity for us to sale the curriculum and get the funding that we need in order to continue, so we desperately need the funding.
PAIGE: Sure. So, if people are interested in supporting you, how would they do that?
ANDREA: Well, we have, our web address is creatorgirls.com. And so, you can go to that website and send and email and also see some pictures of what we’ve been up to. You can also certainly email me, Andreafrost@hotmail.com.
PAIGE: And we’ll have links to all that in the show notes. That’s how we do things.
ANDREA: Cool. Yeah, that program has just been tremendous. We have a huge partnership with Western. With the Association for Women in Computing. We have, I think, probably eight to 10 of the mentors right now. So, probably half the mentors are from Western. Sydney Cool is the main woman behind all of that. Though, she, I think, in general tends to stay in the background a little bit. But she’s amazing. I mean, there’s a long list of people that got together to make it happen, but now it will be up to the support of the community in order for that to continue.
PAIGE: And that’s a hard, hard hurdle to overcome, but it’s totally something we can do together. And that’s — one of my passions right now is, there are a lot of women’s organizations and we’re duplicating a lot of work, because everybody is seeing this problem and really, I think, a lot of us are stepping up to say let’s fix it.
ANGELA: To be an advocate.
PAIGE: Yeah, and I would love to just see all of us kind of come together and work together.
ANDREA: Yeah.
PAIGE: And use contacts and stuff like that.
ANGELA: Share funding.
PAIGE: Yeah.
ANDREA: It’s so interesting to see the transformation. The first days the girls were so timid. They were very scared to actually touch anything. Now, they all want to be engineers and they’re super gung ho.
PAIGE: That’s awesome.
ANDREA: So that’s also where the Walk from Robotics expo came in, because we were like, when they’re done with middle school where are they going to go next. Most people just don’t know what are the options. So, it’s a good follow up to this pilot program for Creators and Innovators to then have a Walk from Robotics expo to help guide, not only that group, but the whole community in terms of if you want to learn about robotics where can you go to do that.
PAIGE: Do any of the high school up here have robot teams, like for robot fights or anything like that?
ANDREA: Yeah, the Sehome Seamonsters. They’re the first robotics team. I think they just went to the world championship.
PAIGE: What?
ANGELA: Wow.
ANDREA: Yeah, it’s amazing. They have an incredible robotics lab that I’m very jealous of.
PAIGE: I mean, you know, you just graduated your first cohort, but are there any existing girls on the high school team?
ANDREA: One girl.
PAIGE: One girl.
ANDREA: Her name is Ky, she’s amazing. She’s also a volunteer with Creators and Innovators, specifically because she’s the only girl. She’s okay with it. There are a lot of women who are totally cool being the only girl in the group, but there’s something very special that happens when women come together and support one another. Now we have 60 girls who want to go on.
PAIGE: That is so cool.
ANGELA: And your website is creative girls?
ANDREA: Creatorgirls.com.
PAIGE: That’s awesome. So, you’re kind of on the tail end of this. How has getting your master’s been? You went and said, I”m not going to have a traditional career path. You jumped out of planes to fight fire, you did all these crazy things, and then you’ve kind of come back around to education. How has it been being a woman in this more traditional path on the other end?
ANDREA: I am not going to lie. It has not always been very fun. There have been a lot of challenges and a lot of really incredible moments along the way. Going to that Grace Hopper conference was a really huge turning point for me, because I no longer questioned whether or not I belonged there. I was in the presence of 5,000 women. All female technologist from all over the world solving problems in incredible ways, and having fun while doing it, and building community with one another. If I hadn’t gone to that conference I would have only ever been exposed to my university, my class. I would not have realized how much potential there was. Now that I’ve seen that, it’s not even just what you see. It’s what you yourself can create in the future. Now I very much know that i belong here and have a place here, and I’m super excited to be able to spread that passion to other people. I think more people should be involved in technology. There’s tons of jobs. Tons of money. It’s intellectually extremely stimulating. There’s so many benefits to it.
PAIGE: You can change the world.
ANDREA: Yeah, you can change the world.
PAIGE: You can type things and change the world.
ANDREA: Yeah.
PAIGE: That blows my mind every day. You’re like the eight person I”ve talked to just today who says, I got into this but then the real pivot point, the real thing that I’ve needed, or the real thing that I’m excited about is community. Even the guys here, part of being at Linux Fest Northwest is that we come together and we’re all giant geeks together. And I love that. I have to say, there are a lot of women on the floor today.
ANGELA: There have been quite a bit and we have been catching them to get littles bits. It is awesome. I’ve been coming here, well over the last eight years at least six times, and there’s a lot more women here.
PAIGE: Yeah, everybody is saying that. There’s young girls. There’s dads with daughters. It’s changing and I’m excited to be a part of that.
ANDREA: Yeah, me too.
PAIGE: Our traditional last question is what are you most excited about about technology right now.
ANDREA: Well, I don’t know I mentioned earlier, I”m opening a code school. I’m a cofounder for codelily.education. There seems to be a lack of accessible education, so I’m really, really excited about being able to provide that for our community. Recently we taught classes in intro to HTML and JavaScript. I thought that the students who came would be reflective of the student body I see in my classes in college, so mostly guys and couple girls. When we promoted the classes in an open, collaborative, accessible environment, we had 100 percent women.
PAIGE: Whoa.
ANGELA: Wow.
ANDREA: Anywhere from 16 years old to 60 years old.
PAIGE: And that wasn’t your target?
ANDREA: No.
PAIGE: Whoa.
ANDREA: I mean, we just put it out there to a few people. We didn’t even really advertise it that much. People are interested in learning, but they want to learn in a more collaborative space where it’s not super competitive and intense with grades and all those things. So, we’re able to provide an alternative route. The first class was 100 percent women. THe second class did have a couple guys. It was really an unexpected thing that happened there. So, I think the more we can move in the direction of building community and collaboration, all those things, we will see more diversity in computing. I’m most excited about being involved in that project, because it’s also very fun to be an entrepreneur and I work with an amazing group of people. I just feel really blessed for all of the opportunities in my life.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Don’t forget that you can email us, WTR@jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can also go to jupiterbroadcasting.com to see the backlog of shows or use the contact form to contact us that way.
PAIGE: You can add us to your favorite podcather with our RSS feed, which you’ll find at jupiterbroadcasting.com unders shows, Women’s Tech Radio. Also, check us out on Twitter. Twitter.com/heywtr.com And if you have an extra minute leave us a review on iTunes. We’d really appreciate it.
ANGELA: And don’t forget that we do a full transcript of every Women’s Tech Radio show which is now available in the show notes on jupiterbroadcasting.com
PAIGE: And so, if you have people who don’t have time to listen but would like to read, head them that way. Thanks so much.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | transcription@cotterville.net

The post Change The World | WTR 26 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Will Secure Boot hamper boutique Linux distributions and hurt desktop Linux innovation? Our panel debates. Also getting started with Linux the right way.

Plus a recap of the first ever Kansas Linux Fest, our errata, your feedback & more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Pre-Show:

• KDE – KDE Ships Plasma 5.2.2, Bugfix Release for March

• Kansas Linux Fest 2015

Boy, did I have a great weekend. Kansas Linux Fest 2015 was an incredible success. We had well over the 130 attendees who signed up on Eventbrite show up throughout the weekend and every single one of them brought a ton of excitement and energy to the first annual Kansas Linux Fest conference.

• Ryan Sipes (@ryanleesipes) | Twitter

Catch Up:

• alt-OS lock out

• Windows 10 to make the Secure Boot alt-OS lock out a reality | Ars Technica

• Correcting The Record on SyncThing

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

• How To Resize Your Droplets on DigitalOcean | DigitalOcean

• BTSync vs. Seafile

LinuxFest Northwest 2015

Bellingham, WA • April 25th & 26th

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

The perfect Linux Rig for Kids?

• The all-new 14” Lemur is coming early April! Starting at $599

We designed the Lemur to balance performance and battery life at a value price point. It’s based on Intel’s 5th Generation Core architecture and features a 2.1GHz Core i3-5010 processor with a 14.1” 1366×768 display. It’s 0.89” tall and weighs 4 lbs with a 62.16Wh battery.

Battery life is up to 9 hours depending on load and screen brightness. When pushing it hard, we could kill the battery in 6 hours.

Linux Academy

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The post Give the Kids Linux | LINUX Unplugged 85 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A list of the most hackable cars has been released on the eve of a highly anticipated Black Hat presentation, Mozilla developers get hacked, getting started with Linux and why a little video games can be good for kids.

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Least Secure Cars Revealed At Black Hat

Research by two security experts presenting at Black Hat this week has labeled the 2014 Jeep Cherokee, the 2015 Cadillac Escalade and the 2014 Toyota Prius as among the vehicles most vulnerable to hacking because of security holes that can be accessed through a car’s Bluetooth, telematics, or on-board phone applications. The most secure cars include the Dodge Viper, the Audi A8, and the Honda Accord, according to Researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek. Millar and Valasek will reveal the full report on Wednesday, but spoke to Dark Reading today with some preliminary data.

The two security experts didn’t physically test the vehicles in question, but instead used information about the vehicles’ automated capabilities and internal network. “We can’t say for sure we can hack the Jeep and not the Audi,” Valasek told Dark Reading. “But… the radio can always talk to the brakes” because both are on the same network. According to the “Connected Car Cybersecurity” report from ABI Research, there have been “quite a few proof of concepts” demonstrating interception of wireless signals of tire pressure monitoring systems, impairing anti-theft systems, and taking control of self-driving and remote control features through a vehicle’s internal bus, known as controller area network (CAN).

• Researchers to name the most hackable cars at Black Hat – Computerworld

Thousands of Mozilla developers’ e-mail addresses, password hashes exposed | Ars Technica

About 76,000 e-mail addresses and 4,000 password hashes were left on a publicly accessible server for about 30 days beginning June 23, according to a blog post. There is no indication the data was accessed, but Mozilla officials investigating the disclosure can’t rule out the possibility.

The code Mozilla uses for their developer login site is open source and posted on GitHub. It looks like from the code they didn’t key stretch the hash. While the salt keeps things ‘safer’ (no rainbow tables, etc), against a GPU brute-forcing attempt, the fact these are straight hashes means they are a little weak against brute-forcing.

Introduction to Linux | edX

Beginning August 1st, The Linux Foundation, in conjunction with online education giant edX, is offering a free Introduction to Linux course.

This class, first announced in early March, is available for free. That’s not bad for a class that usually runs $2,400!

This massively open online course (MOOC) is being taught by Jerry Cooperstein. Cooperstein is a nuclear astrophysicist who’s been using Linux since 1994 and teaching it for almost that long.

According to Dice, the leading career site for technology and engineering professionals, nine out of ten IT hiring managers are looking for Linux pros.

This class looks at Linux from a very high level. You’ll be able to use Linux distributions from any of the three major Linux families, including Red Hat, with Fedora or CentOS; Debian, including Ubunt or Mint; and SUSE, including openSUSE.

This course will cover the various tools and techniques commonly used by Linux programmers, system administrators and end users to do day-to-day work in Linux.

• Linux Foundation’s free online intro to Linux class opens its doors | ZDNet

Could a Little Video Game Play Be Good for Kids?

Researchers found that kids who played video games for less than one hour a day were more likely to be happy, helpful and emotionally stable than kids who never grab a controller, according to findings published online Aug. 4 in the journal Pediatrics.

More than three hours daily of gaming had the opposite effect, however. Video game junkies were more likely to be moody, unhappy with their life and apt to act out in negative ways.

To examine both the positive and negative effects of gaming, researchers assessed the video game habits and emotional growth of nearly 5,000 British boys and girls aged 10 to 15.

The post BlackHat Carmageddon | Tech Talk Today 38 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Angela reads some of the best and of course her favorite bedtime books that she reads to her kids.

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Books that I read tonight:

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Not Linked:

• Isn’t Pig Won’t Naughty? by Richard Scarry
• Pizza Pat by Rita Golden Gelman

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The post Story Time | FauxShow 139 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Angela and Chris share some of their favorite ideas for holiday gifts. All links below are affiliated to help out the Jupiter Broadcasting network!

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For young kids:

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iAccessories:

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Other:

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Audio Book: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B005UR3VFO&source_code=COMA0230WS012110&AID=10298646&PID=4897915

Chrome Plated Linux Fish: https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/2898/?cpg=cj&ref=&CJURL=&CJID=3282554

Linux T-shirt:
https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dadc/?cpg=cj&ref=&CJURL=&CJID=3282554

Tea Infuser:
https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ed08/?pfm=homepage_Featured_8_ed08&cpg=cj&ref=&CJURL=&CJID=3282554

X-Wing Ice Cube Tray:
https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ebf8/?cpg=cj&ref=&CJURL=&CJID=3282554

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Mail Sack:

Glen Writes:

Hey Chris,

I am a big fan of LAS, Tech Snap, and Coder Radio. I was thinking of getting a couple of gift \’cards\’ from Think Geek as gifts this year but I was a little concerned that JB wouldn\’t get credit for that since the recipients might not be using the browser extensions(although I do install them on any computer a family member asks me to work on). Do you know if gift card purchases count as affiliate purchases?

I am also a subscriber through amazon. You guys are the best monthly value I get for the cost of lunch at Taco Bell. Keep up the big, awesome shows every week!

Tom Writes:

Here are some names I came up with for the chat room. Personally I like the first one in my list best.

Jupiter Echo – as when you call out, we respond… or on odd occasion correct Chris
Jupiter Voice – community\’s voice
Medium3 – medium as in speech / writing, 3 as lower third
Medium Squared
Third Cast
Inter-third
Multi-voice
Chatisphere
Infinitalk
Chat Nation
Jupiter Hangout
Jupiter League
Triverse – Combination of Tri and Universe
Trivoice

Alvin writes:

Does your Newegg affiliate link work with newegg.ca? I\’m in Canada and often make purchases through newegg.ca.

When I use your Newegg link (at the bottom of the JB page), Newegg asks if I want to use newegg.ca. When I do, I cannot tell if my purchase will be attributed to your affiliate link. Would your firefox extension be the better option?

Keep up the great work!

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The post Gift Ideas 2012 | FauxShow 118 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We’re still hungover from episode 200, this week: We give you are thoughts and responses to our RMS interview, are we truly being negative in the freedom dimension? Tune in to find out!

Plus we drool over new games coming to Linux, and ask the big question: Can Crowd Funding scale to support open source?

THEN – Matt stops by with a super easy howto for video conferencing under Linux!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

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