Me and my honours project poster made the long journey down to Cardiff for the Lovelace colloquium on 8th April 2010.
Overall it was a really good day with lots of great talks from some truly wonderful women. Dr Elizabeth Sparrow President of the British Computer Society(BCS) talked about the BCS and the way forward and the new projects going on such as the http://savvycitizens.bcs.org/ hoping to encourage people to get the most out of IT. She also mentioned Computing at Schools http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ and BCS supporting their work which is great (yes im a member of both) but also its great to see the collaboration.
Other talks from Eve Andersson(google) and Kate Bittles (IBM) gave an insight into both companies and what they are doing at present.
Beti Williams gave a most amazing talk on the history of Women in Computing, i didnt realise there were so many great computing women out there(Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper , Frances Allen and many more).
Maggie Berry (http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/) spoke about networking and benefits of it. Im the first person to admit going to the colloquium was scary and a new experience for me but I wanted to make the most of it(had been on trains for over 8 hours to get there). Her talk made a lot of sense about networking and i'd actually made contact through twitter with two people who I knew would be attending the colloquium (Dr Sue Black and Hazel McKendrick a games student from Dundee) I had only net contact with them beforehand but on the day managed to speak to both of them and lots of other great people. Thanks for the advice Maggie.
Highlight of the day for me was Dr Sue Blacks (http://www.sueblack.co.uk/ ) talk on her work saving Bletchley park. As the founder of BCS Women she is now trying to save a national landmark. Its amazing the power now of social media and what Sue has achieved using sites such as twitter to promote Bletchley Park and the work needed to be undertaken to one of our great landmarks.
Earlier on she mentioned about her interest in maths as a child – nice to know I wasn’t the only geeky kid out there, while I didnt buy the books Sue I used my old school work to practice with and made up my own work!!! Something by the way my girls like to do (3 future girl geeks maybe)
Had to leave early a bit early to get home but had a really great day thanks everyone esp Miki Burgess who organised Lovelace 2010. :) :)
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