Schools, teachers, parents, students get inquisitive and get experimenting! Google has just launches it’s annual science fair competition!

The Google Science Fair is an online science competition seeking curious minds from the four corners of the globe. Anybody and everybody between 13 and 18 can enter. All you need is an idea.

Geniuses are not always A grade students. We welcome all mavericks, square-pegs and everybody who likes to ask questions. Simply upload your project here to win some life changing prizes.

Everyone has a question. What’s yours?

It could be a new take on particle physics, or game theory. It could be a cost-effective way to provide clean water to a remote community, or maybe a project like reducing the carcinogenic properties of grilled chicken (that was one of last year’s winning entries). It should definitely be inspired.

You might already have the beginnings of an idea. Or just be hungry to get involved. Either way, you have until 30 March 2012 to work on identifying your question and building your project.

Get started right now by registering and securing parental consent.

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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The Scott Trust Ltd, owner of Guardian Media Group plc, is offering two bursaries to assist students who face financial difficulty in attaining the necessary qualifications needed to pursue a career in software development for the web.

The Scott Trust was created in 1936 following the death of CP Scott and his son Edward in 1932. Edward’s brother John was left as the sole owner, and was faced with the threat of death duties, which would have crippled the business and jeopardised the future independence of the newspaper.

To avoid this, and to secure his father’s legacy of the Manchester Guardian’s independent liberal journalism, John Scott voluntarily renounced all financial interest in the business for himself and his family, putting all his shares – worth more than £1 million at the time – into a trust.

Applications for 2011 are now open.  To apply go to www.gnmcareers.co.uk and search under the reference LS34.

Closing date is March 15th, 2011.

As a media organisation The Guardian are keen to reflect the society we serve. We encourage female graduates who have been disadvantaged in terms of their career as a result of family or other domestic

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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With today being International Women’s Day we wanted to bring you a way of actively participating to improve the lives of women in some of the poorest parts of the world.  We’ve been searching out a few different options and have settled on the Malawi Challenge!  We hope you find the challenge of interest and see it as a worth cause.

The MicroLoan Foundation, a London-based charity, works to give some of the poorest women in Africa the opportunity to work their way out of poverty for good. They use the donations they receive to give small loans and essential business training to help empower women to start their businesses, enabling them to feed their families every day.

In an effort to raise more funds and support theses entrepreneurial women, MicroLoan is organising the Malawi Challenge 2011, a female only physical challenge designed to let entrepreneurial women of the western world empower those less fortunate to build their own successful self-sufficient business.

The trek, which will run from 30^th September to 8^th October 2011, is an 8-day challenge which includes 3 days trekking in the Mulanje massif, camping in mountain huts, a day in the rural villages near Lake Malawi meeting staff and clients of the Microloan Foundation to see firsthand the impact of the fundraising, as well as some time for personal reflection and experiencing the real Africa.

You don’t need to be an Olympic athlete to join in, but you do need to be in reasonably good health and willing to commit to the training programme to make sure you get the maximum enjoyment from the trek without risking injury. To find out more, please register at www.malawi-challenge.com. Places are limited, but if you’re unsure you can register your interest and sign up for one of the free seminars which aim to explain more about the challenge and what you’ll be letting yourself in for before you fully commit!

You can follow the progress of the challenge on their Facebook Page!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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The incredible team at the University of Southampton successfully launched a Windows Phone 7 handset into the stratosphere as a testbed for a series of experiements to further atmospheric research into pollution. Friday’s launch utilised a helium filled balloon to elevate a small package to an altitude of 18237 meters/59832 feet. The package contained a Windows 7 phone handset, additional power supply and a commodity digital camera which recorded 1,200 images during the flight.

At it’s maximum altitude the balloon burst (as expected!) and the package returned to Earth via a small parachute. During the flight a custom application on the phone recorded the latitude, longitude and altitude. While in range of the cellular network the application streamed it’s data to another application running on Windows Azure.Windows Azure provided the computational “horse power” to project the likely landing point of the package.

The image below shows the team preparing to launch Astra 7

This is a great example of inexpensive hardware being combined in a creative way with phone software and a cloud service to enable something (scientific research in this case) that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive yet which can bring benefit to us all.

The team’s write up provides much more information as does Stuart Dredge’s article on the Guardian tech blog and Cliff Saran’s piece on Computer Weekly.

Kudos to Keith who beat me to it in his post which gives a heads up of the flight’s impressive statistics.

The image below shows the package containing the phone at it’s maximum altitude

Congratulations to the Astra 7 team including Dr Andras Sobester, Dr
Elizabeth Hart, Dr Steven Johnston and Neil O_Brien. Thanks to Geoff
Hughes, Ben Nunney (@bennuk), Will Coleman and Lou Waller for their support

I’m delighted to be able to say that this wasn’t a PR stunt – it was
serious scientific research as part of The University of Southampton’s
ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) project

About Stephen Lamb

Steve Lamb is known to be a positive disruptive force and is a geek with a passion for making the most of every day!

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Imperial College in London are holding a Fashion event focusing on technology and innovation. They have put forward a top fashion designer and combined their expertise with the students from the London Fashion School to create a fashion show focusing on technology and fashion.

The students have called upon the readers and supporters of GirlyGeekdom as they need our help! They need to find geeky clothes to do awesome innovative things with, so if you have any old geeky tshirts from tech events that you no longer need or anything like geeky badges, stickers and so on then the students would love to hear from you!

If you get involved you may well see your clothes strutting their stuff in front of the press, designers and the geekiest of fashion folks! We don’t often ask for a lot but this time we’re going all out!!!

The fashion show is being held on the 7th March so that doesn’t leave long for you to sift through your wardrobes and find those geeky things!!! If you do have items that you would like to put towards this fashionable geekfest then please drop an email to the co-ordinator for this event.

You can also find all the details to come along to the fashion show by joining the Facebook Event.  This article was brought to you as a result of a quick tweet from @lxs For those attending the event please use the #tag #StrutOurScience

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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I work full time as a software developer and am studying for a BSc(Hons) in my spare time. Recently I’ve been finding it really difficult to push myself forward through the final years so I’ve decided to write down the advice I’ve given to other people in the past with the hope of taking it in myself .

Losing momentum on the downward slope
I’m four years into my degree and I have two years left so I’m on the downward slope. Many said I was on the home straight and it would be easier to have that goal insight. Except….it’s not. It’s hard! Make no mistake those last few legs are the most tiring. This being said, keep your chin up, there are only a few more assignments to go. Look at what you have already achieved, you are almost there!

Career is progressing and so I have less time to focus
This is something I’ve found recently. My career is progressing really well and I’m really happy with it. On the flip side of this I’m not able to concentrate as much on my coursework as I used to. So what you need to do is allocate time for you studies, sit in a room with NO distractions and do what you can in that time.

It’s hard to plan the tasks without peers
What I have just started to do is treat each module like an epic. Each assignment within that epic has a story and then you break down that story into tasks. The idea is that you can move tasks through a Kanban board to give you a sense of achievement. Any blockages can also be seen very quickly and you can rank tasks by importance. I use kanbantool.com

I don’t have much contact with peers or tutor
This is a hard one. How do you know you’re on the right track if you’re not seeing a tutor or peer? The best thing I have come up with is to make sure you have a peer as a point of contact for a student view and also touch base with your tutor fortnightly if possible. I try to make a list of things that I want to address over the weeks so that I don’t forget when I do contact them. If you don’t have peers or a tutor, use your network you will find people are helpful.

Feeling like you are very behind
You know…you’re probably not. If you touch base with your peers you will probably find you are only a little behind or even right on track. The only way to sort this is to speak to someone to clarify where you are at and where you should be heading.

Not having access to the lecture feedback or questions
It’s hard to compensate for this one, you’re not in the lectures so you aren’t getting what all of the other students are in the way of context. It’s easy to read the material online but it is so much better when you have the context behind it. However remember you are working, you have real life work experience and resources. I have found so many members of my industry network have been so willing to help and are the perfect people to ask.

I don’t have any rest time
I find that when its term time the only thing I am thinking when I’m not at work is “shouldn’t I being doing some coursework right now?!” that feeling doesn’t go away, believe me I’ve tried. However you must still remember to take a break now and again and enjoy yourself. A refreshed mind is a clearer more productive mind!

On the whole, yes it is hard but you have to keep going. You can do it! Now haven’t you got an assignment to do?!

S

About Sara Stephens

I'm a Web Developer. I work for a media company in London while I study in my spare time at Essex University for a BSc(Hons) degree in Computing Solutions. I enjoy most aspects of development and I am always on the look-out for new technologies to experiment with and master.

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GirlyGeekdom is nominated in the Computer Weekly Blog Awards for top Twitter user, and it’s founder Sarah Blow is nominated for top IT female. Please do take a moment to vote! You can also vote for Girls n Gadgets in the top Gadget Blog whilst you’re there! (Girls n Gadgets sometimes post here too!)

Join the Computer Weekly Blog Awards Charity Challenge

This year Computer Weekly have added a special category to the Blog Awards in order to help raise funds for a fantastic cause, through donations to a special charity project.

The charity is Computer Aid International and the project we would like you to support is Computers for Schools Kenya.

It costs just £50 to get a refurbished PC onto a Kenyan school desk. There is a chronic shortage of PCs in the Kenyan school system and many Kenyan children complete school never having a seen a PC. Without simple IT literacy these children will be denied basic life chances such as equal access to employment opportunities.

All we are asking you to do is to make a donation by clicking on the  Just Giving page, and state it was GirlyGeekdom that encouraged you to donate.

Visit the Just Giving page for all the details and to Donate Now.

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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So you’ve just got your exam results and they weren’t quite what you were hoping for, you now want to go through Clearing but don’t know for sure that you’ll get into a course that suits you.  We did a series of hints and tips from people on Twitter last year and put together some useful sites which are still appropriate today!

One of the problems is that there are so few places this year and you wanted to do law, marketing or something else but don’t think you can get into the university that you want to. What do you do?! Well sit down and ask yourself a few simple questions…

1. Are you OK at maths? (with A level ideally but possibly with just a good GCSE)
2. Do you like science?
3. Are you good at analysing things?
4. Do you like using technology or like gadgets such as IPhones?
5. Do you like a challenge?
6. Are you competitive?

Well if you answered yes to more than 2 – 3 of those questions then you will probably find that you’ll enjoy a career in computer science, information systems, informatics or business & technology.  So here’s what I would propose.  Look for clearing places in these areas, personally I loved Manchester but I hear good things about Reading, Portsmouth, Southampton and Sheffield.

If you’re not yet convinced then here are some interesting facts about our industry.  Whilst the demand for people working in technology is going up there are less UK students going and studying this as a course.  At the end of the course you have a good sound basis for applying for graduate roles or junior roles in companies that require software engineers, programmers, designers and lower management.  After a few years with the right company you should be able to move up the organization and will always be learning!

Still not sure?  The BCS (British Computing Society) launched a site showing some of the interesting careers that can come off the back of studing Computer Science.  There are some really good video’s there as well!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Are you tired of the disapproving looks you get from others when your children are running riot?  Do you wish your children could be like ‘those’ children who sit quietly and do what they are told rather than furiously drawing on the walls?

This week on the Lady Geek TV App Show we have a special Mumsnet episode with the founder of Mumsnet.com Justine Roberts. Justine and Debs will be showing you smartphone apps that will keep your children from getting bored, as well as an app to video record those rare moments when your child is behaving perfectly.

First up this week is Fish School (brought to our attention by The App Whisperer). Fish School is an educational iPhone App which teaches your kids reading, maths and differences with the help of brightly coloured fish floating in formation, spelling out words, numbers, and shapes.

Next we have Qik, the mobile video camera, a real favourite from Nokia’s Ovi store. It transmits a videostream live to the web, fantastic for capturing and, more importantly, sharing those spontaneous moments as they happen and ensure you keep those unforgettable memories.

The Lady Geek App of the Week is Toddler Lock, which transforms your phone into a magical toy guaranteed to entrance both you and your toddler.

If you are a mum with children, please get in touch and tell us your favourite app before Mon 16th August and we will feature your app in our next mums special.  Just by ‘liking’ our facebook page Lady Geek TV you will be automatically entered into our competition to win this week’s smartphone Nokia 6700 slide.

Have an ‘appy’ week!

www.ladygeektv.com
www.twitter.com/ladygeektv

About Belinda Parmar

Lady Geek brings you research and Lady Geek TV gadget app news! You'll find more about it all over on http://ladygeek.org.uk

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This weekend I was having a bit of a clear out and I’ve got a pile of what I would class as out of date, old programming books.  My initial thought on what to do with these is split into two camps. Firstly donate them to a local school, or secondly donate them to the local charity shop.  My problem here is that I’ve no idea which is the better option or if there is another option that is quick, easy and doesn’t involve posting heavy books half way round the world?

So really this is just a shout out asking what everyone else does with their old programming books such as Java 1.1 and C# for Visual Studio 2008 as examples of just a couple of the books that are on the list.

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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