The end of March saw the inaugural ‘Hack-her-thon’ event take place at Norwich High School for Girls, expertly organised and hosted by alumnae Britt Dewing and Alice Tubby from the Class of 2022. Across two days, over 50 female-identifying and non-binary students in Years 9-13 from six schools across Norfolk worked in groups to code their own environmentally-themed apps.

Highlights of the event included a GUI workshop, the fantastic panel of local experts sharing their journey to STEM careers and the guest speaker, Dave Willis, who told the story of how he helped put together a Nature published paper on CO2 emissions during the pandemic in just six weeks with the help of code.

Britt Dewing, Norwich High School for Girls alumna, said “I think the most valuable experience for the participants was the chance to speak to so many wonderful mentors from the tech industry. Volunteers worked with groups to plan and build their apps, and chatted to participants about what they do, giving them a genuine insight into their careers. I hope that allowed the participants to picture themselves in the tech industry too.”

Britt continued: “Computer Science has the largest gender-gap of all subjects at A Level. I am so proud that we got over 50 girls and non-binary folk coding and learning by experimentation. Trial and error is so important in learning anything (especially to code), and it’s therefore vital to create the right spaces for young people of all genders to feel confident and comfortable doing this, which is what we did with the Hack-her-thon. It was such a privilege to watch the participants build in confidence. I’m very grateful to the teachers at Norwich High who made this event possible; Ian Horne, Alison Sefton and Fiona Kempton – thank you all for all your time and dedication. You are all wonderful.”

Carolyn Jones, Tom Alabaster, Hannah Sangar and Sam Cuthell joined us as mentors from the Naked Wines UK Tech team. Carolyn Jones, Head of QA at Naked Wines, said: “Despite technology having flourished in the last 20 years, girls are still less likely to pursue careers in Computing roles today. This has nothing to do with ability as we well witnessed at this Hack-her-thon event; so many bright young local students with amazing drive, determination and more importantly good coding skills!

As a driver behind Women in Tech at Naked it’s definitely given me food for thought on how we attract this pool of talent into our Naked Technology team!”

Hannah Sangar, Web Developer at Naked Wines added: “I had a great day helping at the Norwich High Hack-her-thon. It was fantastic to see so many female-identifying and non-binary students getting stuck in and writing code for their own apps, some for the very first time!

As mentors, hopefully we went some way to inspiring the students but the real inspiration came from Britt and Alice who organised and ran the whole event with passion, enthusiasm, and heaps of confidence having only finished their A levels last year. They were brilliant role models for all the students.”

Thank you to the panel speakers:

Ilona Utting from Wex Photo Video, Leanna Lucas from Aviva and Key-note speaker David Willis.

Thank you to all the mentors:

Rose Bonner from Neontribe, Issy Szemeti from Starling Bank, Charlie Strange, Carolyn Jones & Hannah Sangar & Tom Alabaster & Sam Cuthell from Naked Wines, Alex Read from the GDST, and Hannah Winter from Cambridge University Press and Assessment.