Five members of our staff visited a local school in Newbury to show young girls the wide variety of careers available to them in the technology world. We conducted a hands-on session where we tasked the girls with creating items and their variants and trying some coding in Dynamics NAV.
After speaking to the girls about the lack of women in the industry, they were able to do some development on the Dynamics NAV item card. By acting as developers on a project for a fictitious fashion company, they learnt how to add attributes to the item table. By starting off by adding Brand and Size with some guidance from us, it was then up to them to add as many attributes as they could think of and be as creative as they wanted.
Some creative ones included:
- Material e.g. leather, cotton, velvet, polyester, Lycra
- Occasion e.g. wedding, holiday, going out-out, daywear
- Sleeve e.g. short, long, puffy
The girls had a lot of fun and got a taste of what development involved. We conducted two sessions for 28 girls and loved the enthusiasm they showed for learning more.
At the end, we asked them to guess what jobs our staff in attendance did - this small task showed them that their preconceptions of what we do are normally incorrect. For example, Adam being the only male always gets the developer card! By showing the girls what we actually do, and that the girls are actually the 'techie' ones, shows them that girls can do anything!