Girls’ Coding Bootcamp

Girls’ coding bootcamp was a web development session done for school girls. It was organized by Women Techmakers Sri Lanka and IEEE women in Engineering Sri Lanka. It was happened on 2nd and 3rd of December 2017 in University of Colombo. I get to know that organizers are calling upon for mentors by a published poster in WTM fb page.

I was seleted as a mentor for the event, it was a women only event. So only 20 girls have been selected as mentors snd about 50 school girls participated for the event. I was really happy that I get this opportunity because it is very good to improve my soft skills and also my teaching skills.

Those two days were really well spent days in my life. Among those 50 participants there were Ordinary Level students as well as Advanced Level students. Some of them had some knowledge about web development and some didn’t have a clue about what is web development. But at the end of 2 days session they all were able to make there own web site and host them also. So I think this event was a huge success and I’m really proud to be a part of it.

On the first day, the first session of HTML was done by WTM techlead Miss. Dinuka Jayaweera. So the girls had to built a web page using HTML and inline CSS after the small introduction to HTML and CSS by her. That’s when the mentors had to come to the stage. It was a great pleasure for me to working with those girls and helping them out because many of them didn’t have a idea about that they are going to do. We taught them step by step and explained each tag we used and finally before lunch every girls made there own portfolio web page.

After the lunch, they were taught how to use CSS outside there HTML file.Then they try to do modifications to there codes and put all the CSS codes in a seperate css file and link that file to html file. All the girls who participated was really happy about what they have studied.

After that the hosting part was done by Miss.Nuwini, she is a undergraduate at UCSC and a WIE member. To do that we have selected the freenom(freenom.com)for choosing a domain name.We can get free domain names from that site and once we get a domain we then go to 000webhost (www.000webhost.com) and make a account and then we get a hosting name for our own following by 00webhost name.We can change it by following the instructions in that site and change it to the domain name we got from freenom. For a example the domain I got from freenom is lakshika.ml and 000webhost name comes as www.lakshika.000webhost.com. So we can change it to www.lakshika.ml by following the instructions and then we can built a web page there or upload a already built web page. So at the end of the day all the participants have built a web page and hosted there web page in their own domain name.

On the second day, we started with bootstrap. We discussed about what is responsiveness and how to make a web page responsive. Then participants made their periously made web pages responsively. Then Mrs. Dilrukshi Gamage educated the girls about web templetes and girls made web sites using wordpress and weebly. At last as a additional thing she discussed about how to use the google drive because many of the girls didn’t even have a email address. So first we had to help them to make their emails before doing the hosting part. And suddenly we thought of doing a session to aware them on how to use the drive. In that session they were educated how to make folders and how to make documents, slides etc and share documents with others like wise. And then Miss. Dinuka introduced them some of the competitions google has for students like GSoC,GCI and WTM scholarship so that they can participate to those competitions. So at the end of two days of time all of us were really satisfied of the stuff we have done and we have get to know.

As a mentor for this event I also get the chance to refresh my knowledge. Everyone was happy and satisfied and as organizers we thought of continuing this work for betterment of students.