Lower Merion School District: LMHS Hosts All-Girl Hack-A-Thon

Press release from the Lower Merion School District:

2021-03-25

Lower Merion High School recently hosted more than 50 girls from 15 local high schools at girls.hack("LM") – a virtual, girls-only hack-a-thon providing an opportunity for students to participate in a challenging and engaging coding competition, to network with young women who share an interest in programming and to help foster a passion for computer science.

At the event - planned and organized by LMHS computer science teacher Tom Swope and seniors Ella Lawrence, Anne Hamilton, Maggie Hollis and Sara Beqiraj – teams participated in a coding a challenge where they were tasked with writing creative coding extensions of the game tic-tac-toe, which were later evaluated by representatives from the Susquehanna International Group (SIG), who served as the corporate sponsor of the event.

Throughout the day, Lower Merion's aforementioned student leaders taught lessons in the programming languages Java and Python, as well as in the general area of artificial intelligence, while also providing technical support throughout the event. Participants also had the opportunity to interact with the SIG employees by playing a popular online card game known as lizard and to hear from Gina Pinotti, SIG's Global Head of Technology, who shared her background and story to help encourage those in attendance to consider careers in STEM fields.

This press release was produced by the Lower Merion School District .The views expressed here are the author’s own.