AMHERST - The fifth annual Girls Connect event was held Saturday at the Computer Science Building at UMass Amherst. The event is a one-day introduction to FIRST LEGO League for teams of middle-school girls aged 8 to 13 where they learn technology, computers, robotics and build their confidence through team work.
There are teams of five or six where they are tasked to build and program a robot to perform real-world tasks with the help of parents, teachers and professional engineers.
The program is sponsored by the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE), Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP), For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), LEGO Education and Girls Incorporated of Holyoke.
There are about 1.4 million computer specialists jobs expected to open in the US by 2018, and 29 percent of these jobs could be filled by US computing graduates by 2018. CAITE estimates there will not be enough computer scientists to fill the positions.