Inspiration
Young girls often have less opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Being a young woman in high school myself, I feel the need to empower other young women to pursue their interests in STEM or to spur their interests in STEM because diversity is important in the STEM field. The evident negative stereotypes about women in STEM and the necessity to disprove them inspired me to create my iOS app called Inspiration. Through my app, I wanted young girls to be able to explore STEM careers in an interactive way.
In order to combat the negative stereotypes of women in STEM, my app displays influential females in STEM and engaging activities to do in order to emulate their passions in STEM. My app uses machine learning to allow girls to be immersed in information regarding day to day objects and some of the famous women pioneers in their respective fields. Inspiration allows young girls to explore different STEM careers through simple objects.
To use the app, girls can use their camera to point their phone at an object and to take a picture of the object. Using machine learning and object detection/image labeling, the app detects what object is in the photo. It then displays relevant careers in STEM involving the object and prompts the user to view an influential woman in the same career. The app displays accomplishments of the influential woman as well as interactive activities that young girls can pursue to spark their interests in the same career. For example, a girl may take a picture of a computer and the app will suggest a career choice as a web developer or software engineer. Then the app may suggest Grace Hopper as the influential female and show coding activities such as an Hour of Code. The girls can save the influential female’s profile with the activities in order to come back to the activities in the future. At the home page, the girls can view the influential females that they saved. Everyday, the home page displays a new influential female for girls to learn about.
