With 30 projects, Arduino Quest concludes, an initiative to bring girls closer to STEM

November 2021.- With the goal of bringing girls and adolescents closer to the world of programming and technology, the Niñas Pro corporation, together with the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), held the Arduino Quest 2021. “This year we had 46 girls participating, of whom 32 reached the third phase in which they build their project with the Arduino kit,” explains Florencia Miranda, director of Niñas Pro.

“For the IMFD, it is very important to support initiatives that promote the participation of girls, adolescents, and women in STEM, seeking to bring the broad field of data science closer to society, ideally contributing to closing the gender gap in an area where efforts are still needed,” says Noemí Miranda, Communications Director at IMFD.

The institute has been carrying out this activity in partnership with Niñas Pro since 2020, with support from the Millennium Scientific Initiative, as part of the Ellas Programan line, a series of joint activities aimed at reducing the gender gap in computer science.

The Arduino Quest consists of a series of sessions for girls and adolescents, in which participants learn to program, first in theory, and then receive an Arduino board to test what they have designed in programming.

Pau Carrión, one of the course participants, explained that “at first there are theoretical classes about how Arduino works. Then you move on to a more practical phase using a simulator on your computer, so you do not have an accident at home the first time you use the kit. After the simulator, you start solving challenges, like making an LED light turn on without burning it out, or making it turn on at one-second intervals.”

An Arduino is an open-source hardware and software system that allows you to create interactive digital applications to control objects, function as sensors, and, in general, perform an action in the real world. Arduino boards have microprocessors and controllers that can be configured to fulfill the goal defined by their programmer.

Check out a video with the projects here: