Presentation of the 2015 Brigitte Gilles Prize
The projects "Go4IT!" and "Promotions-CAFÉ" won the 2015 Gilles Prize for the Promotion of Women.
The prize, which is named after the first RWTH Aachen Equal Opportunities Officer, Brigitte Gilles, is to recognize projects which stimulate the interest of female school students in technical and natural science (STEM) courses of study and the number of female researchers. Furthermore, it supports projects that contribute to the improvement of women's teaching and working conditions at the University.
Apart from relevance to the University, selection criteria include innovativeness and sustainability. This year, the prize money of 5,000 Euros goes to the projects “go4IT!” by the Learning Technologies Research Group and “Promotions-CAFÉ” by the Gender Team of the AlgoSyn graduate research training group in collaboration with the Computer Science department.
Go4IT!
In the Go4IT! project, female pupils between eleven and thirteen years of age have the chance to program robots and showcase their programming skills in a final demonstration, where they present their robots' programmed sequence of movements.
Furthermore, there is a workshop for girls on the development of smartphone apps. As Dr. Nadine Bergner from the Learning Technologies Research Group announced, “with the help of the prize money, we want to establish a course on the design of clothes with special technological features.”
Promotions-Café
The Promotions-Café event series serves as a platform for all doctoral candidates in STEM subjects. Through talks and subsequent group discussions, traditional social traditions and ways of thinking shall be questioned and new ways of family and working life reflected and discussed, with the overall goal of improving the working conditions of women academics. The prize money will be used to secure the continuation of the events series.