On April 28th the SAP Young Thinkers Network together with the Faculty of Wirtschaftsinformatik at University of Mannheim offered several workshops at the Girls Day 2016, which is a Germany wide initiative to inspire girls to code.
Nearly 60 girls between 14 and 19 years from schools in the Metropol Region ‘Rhein-Neckar’ came together at University of Mannheim. They all were curious and excited about the invite and eager to learn about IT. Two students representing the faculty for business informatics and business mathematics talked about the study and their personal experience and learnings.
Christiane Bauer, global lead of SAP Young Thinkers Network together with her team introduced SAP and the SAP Young Thinkers Network including a presentation about the possibilities of gaining valuable practical working experience as working student at an interesting employer as SAP. After a campus tour the girls took part in different IT related workshops, Mathematic, Coding, Entrepreneurship, the last two being part of the SAP Young Thinkers portfolio.
During the Business Model Canvas Workshop the girls all “became” shepherds and learned about business planning and what to consider if you want to become an entrepreneur and run your own business. The girls very extremely creative and develop interesting ideas like a sheep for therapy, sheep races or the sheep model which is trained to be part of advertising purposes. The students learned what kind of partnerships, clients and resources you need, what kind of activities you need to do and with what income you can count, which distribution ways you could and how to calculate costs.
The feedback of the group was very positive, all hands raised for fun and good learning experience.
The scratch programming workshop was led by Claudia Loff, a project manager who currently pursues a fellowship with the SAP Young Thinkers Network and Lenny Nuernberg, a working student. The girls aimed to learn how to code their own software project. Following the guiding idea from the “sheep-minded” Business Model Canvas exercise, they programmed a simulation of a sheep-shearing business. In their very positive feedback the young women expressed especially the freedom given to them to be creative by shearing not only sheep but also other animals like dogs and lions, the possibility to really get their hands down to code things on their own and still having the opportunity to ask the coaches for help if needed. “Coding is not THAT difficult if you have an interesting and easy entry and empathy for the problem to solve. It was a pleasure to see and feel how excitement was transformed into learning seamlessly”, Claudia mentioned in the workshop debrief.
Special thanks to Catrin Lutz from University of Mannheim, who organized and hosted the event.
Please find the article about the Girls Day of University of Mannheim here.
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