On Saturday, November 2, employees from Brightspot participated in the Tiger Woods Foundation STEM Career and College Conference, hosted at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC, inspiring children to pursue career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Kathy Bihr, Vice President of Programs at the Tiger Woods Foundation, spoke to the value and impact of the Conference and participating companies, “The STEM Career and College Conference is a great way for young people to learn by guided-experience from experts in engineering, biotechnology, cybersecurity and much more. We were fortunate to have Brightspot offer an interactive workshop on HTML web design allowing students to take their creativity to the next level.”
“The STEM Career and College Conference is a great way for young people to learn by guided-experience from experts in engineering, biotechnology, cybersecurity and much more."
The Career Conference was founded with the goal of exposing DC youths to a variety of career and college opportunities through hands-on workshops and preparation seminars. Brightspot employees – Jenny Daly, Dylan Gang, Martin Svetoslavov, and Ryan Anderson – led a workshop, teaching students how a website goes from concept to reality and the unique aspects of their jobs. During the 90-minute session, students learned about information architecture, visual design, and front-end coding, and were ultimately tasked with organizing, designing, and developing a site for a favorite athlete or celebrity.
Students were provided with basic HTML and CSS code and given complete control to build a site, learning how to insert and format text and images, find hex codes to change background colors, create a navigation bar with links, and manipulate a site’s grid layout.
Reflecting on the day, Jenny Daly was struck by ability of students to take the information they had just learned and translate it into a real life project, “The students were genuinely interested and engaged throughout our presentation. I was impressed with their sketches and ability to navigate through and even write some of their own code.”
Following the morning workshops, students and parents had the opportunity to attend a college and career fair where they could explore additional opportunities based on the experiences they enjoyed during the workshops.
