We kicked off the October half-term with a 2-day ‘big data’ themed hack at Christ Church college Oxford, sponsored by BIPB.
Over the weekend, 30 girls and their parents played with data (lot of numbers and stats) on topics as diverse as boybands, Build-a-Bear and nutrition to create beautiful data visualisations and informative infographics.

Our sponsors, Business Intelligence specialists BIPB flew in Hannah Curtis – a consultant from their New York office to help girls get to grips with industry tool Qlikview and a big data feed from Twitter.

Saturday started with some icebreaking activities, a delivery of muffins and a ‘teach’ session for each of the tools. The girls then got to grips with creating from data and spent the day building visualisations – breaking only for lunch and an afternoon tour of Christ Church college.

On Sunday we kicked off the day with Muffins and the introduction of judging criteria for the presentations. Girls spent the day finishing their projects and then rehearsing & refining their presentations for the 5pm panel of judges. The girls also filled in CREST diaries for the weekend  – they’ll be getting some British Science Association certificates for their efforts.

Then we entered an auditorium in college to finish off the hack. 13 presentations were delivered by girls from 7 years old all the way up to 22 and the judges (and Stemette volunteers) were overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of work that had been done.

They deliberated whilst the audience voted for their favourite and prizes were awarded to the winners in each Category – “Big Data of Me”, “Answers to the Universe” and “All you can eat data” – highly commended and ‘people’s choice’ (voted for by the audience). See full details on the hack minisite and the full gallery of images on our Flickr Photostream.

A great weekend was had by all and we’re looking forward to returning to Oxford some time in the future.  Thanks to our sponsors BIPB, O2 for providing the laptops and Christ Church college for hosting us. Also a huge thanks to all of the helpers and supporters who turned up to mentor over the weekend.

In the meantime, the countdown to the Stemette show has begun! We’ll be at the Crystal building in Docklands on 23rd November from 10-6pm running a variety of STEM workshops. Sign up now. Our next hackathon will be during the February half-term in 2014, in London.

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