=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3607/paper5
|storemode=property
|title=Code Huntresses: promoting gender equity in ICTs
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3607/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-3607
|authors=Romina García,Alejandra Armendariz,Julieta Umpierrez,Claudina Rattaro
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/lawcc/GarciaAUR23
}}
==Code Huntresses: promoting gender equity in ICTs==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3607/paper5.pdf
Code Huntresses: promoting gender equity in ICTs
Romina García1,† , Alejandra Armendariz1,† , Julieta Umpierrez1,† and
Claudina Rattaro1,*,†
1
Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, 11300, Uruguay
Abstract
Multiple metaphors are used to describe the gender gap in areas of knowledge linked to careers in
science, technology, engineering and mathematics. One of them is the existence of a "glass ceiling" that
prevents women from reaching higher levels in their professional development. There is also talk of
the "leaky pipeline" to describe when women begin an educational or professional path, but gradually
leave it, either for personal reasons or because of institutional barriers, stereotypes and other forms of
discrimination. Many of these "leaks" are encountered from their passage through secondary education.
Working with adolescent girls at the secondary school level, seeking to provide them with key knowledge
of these disciplines and encouraging them to choose careers in this area, has been a strategy chosen
by several organizations around the world. In this sense, and taking advantage of the celebration of
the International Day of Girls in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the Faculty of
Engineering of the University of the Republic has been giving technological workshops for several years
to adolescents between 12 and 16 years of age as a way of promoting ICT careers in Uruguay. This article
presents in detail the "Code Huntresses" workshop so that it can be replicated and/or adapted by other
institutions, and also presents the results obtained from the first edition of the workshop.
Keywords
hands-on workshop, women in engineering, ICT careers, Uruguay
1. Introduction
For some time now, the low participation of women as students, researchers and professionals
in the areas of knowledge related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)
careers has emerged as a problem on the agenda of different public and private institutions.
This is a concern not only in our country, but also in several countries in Latin America and the
world. Seeking to reach adolescent girls who have not yet defined their vocational future, which
is a strategy followed by several countries around the world [1, 2, 3], resulted in the beginning
in 2016 of the project "Promoting ICT careers in female adolescents in secondary education
in Uruguay" (see the project’s WebPage, FRIDA Award 2018 winner project). This initiative
is carried out by female teachers, articulating their extension and teaching functions, mainly
belonging to the Institutes of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the School of
Engineering, University of the Republic. The main objective of the project is to bring aspects of
Proceedings XV Congress of Latin American Women in Computing 2023, October 16–20, 2023, La Paz, Bolivia
*
Corresponding author.
†
These authors contributed equally.
$ rominag@fing.edu.uy (R. García); aarmendariz@fing.edu.uy (A. Armendariz); jumpierrez@fing.edu.uy
(J. Umpierrez); crattaro@fing.edu.uy (C. Rattaro)
© 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) closer to adolescent female high school
students in order to promote their training and professional future in this area. It also seeks
to generate spaces for reflection for the general public in order to break down stereotypes
about women and technology. To date, more than 1,500 adolescents from public and private
institutions in the country have participated in different activities (talks, visits, workshops, etc.).
A key activity of the project is the celebration of the International Day of Girls in ICTs on the
fourth Thursday of April each year, promoted by the International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) of the United Nations. Its main objective is to open the doors of educational institutions,
companies and scientific-technological spaces to groups of primary and secondary school girls,
so that they can make contact with the area of ICTs. Under the slogan of “doing instead of
seeing”, and under a role-model approach, since 2017, we celebrate this day in our Faculty by
offering workshops on programming, robotics, databases, telecommunications, electronics, etc.
A summary and description of the different workshops can be found in our WebPage and in
the articles [4, 5, 6] (particularly the latter describes the adaptation made of the workshops
to the distance modality, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, carried out in the 2021
edition). In this year’s edition (see diffusion material in Figure 1), which was attended by a total
of 230 adolescents and in which to the traditional workshops the new workshop called “Code
Huntresses" was added.
The new workshop was designed and executed by a group of four professors from the
Telecommunications and Signal Processing Departments of the Institute of Electrical Engi-
neering. The workshop involved different disciplines of the ICT area; in particular, aspects
of wireless networks, software defined radio, coding and decoding, radio spectrum, etc. The
workshop was conducted as a treasure hunt, allowing the teenage girls, in small groups, to walk
around and get to know different parts of the Faculty building while doing the workshop. In
addition, in order to make the role of women in areas related to ICTs more visible, the dynamics
of the workshop was used to allow the teenagers to meet different women leaders and teachers
of the Institute of Electrical Engineering, some of them with relevant careers in different areas
at national and international level (As an example, some of the women the teenagers met are:
Eng. María Simón (former Dean of the Faculty, former Minister of Education and Culture
and President of the state-owned telecommunications company); Eng. Fiorella Haim General
Manager of Plan Ceibal [7], Eng. Alicia Fernández reference in the development of Artificial
Intelligence in Uruguay, etc).
The rest of the article is structured as follows. In section 2 the “Code Huntresses” workshop is
described, detailing the materials and equipment used. This section mentions different important
aspects to take into account in order to replicate the workshop and details of its implementation.
In section 3 some results obtained from the first edition of the workshop are summarized. In
particular, we present some graphs of a survey done by the participants of the workshop. Finally,
in section 4 we draw some conclusions, reflections and lessons learned.
2. “Code Huntresses” workshop
As mentioned in the previous section, this workshop consisted of a treasure hunt throughout
the Faculty building, where participants received (using software define radio devices) images of
Figure 1: Part of the diffusion material of the activity developed in 2023 within the framework of the
International Day of Girls in ICTs. Dissemination was carried out via social networks and e-mail.
prominent women from the Institute of Electrical Engineering. The transition between different
checkpoints (detailed in Section 2.2) was done through clues with encoded information. High
school students participating in the event were divided into groups of five members who faced
the challenges. Each group was accompanied by a professor from the institute who took the
opportunity to provide information about the courses, the faculty, the University, etc.
The activity followed a workshop structure, in which participants were first provided with
a concise theoretical overview, followed by a hands-on approach with a strong emphasis on
practical exercises. This designed workshop aimed to acquaint the young participants with
concepts including the radio spectrum, the utilization of software tools like SDR++ [8] and
software-defined radio (SDR) devices, in addition to introducing them to the basics of encoding
and decoding.
2.1. Workshop Preparation
The workshop’s preparation involved the study and adaptation of hardware and software
materials. Transmission and reception systems were implemented using various technologies.
The objective was to centralize difficulties primarily in the transmitting aspects, with the
intention of making the reception process more straightforward (to be performed by high school
students). The entire workshop was conducted using laptops donated to the faculty by Ceibal of
the Wezen model (2022). Ceibal is Uruguay’s digital technology center for education innovation
at the service of public education policies. Ceibal promotes the integration of technology to
improve learning and foster innovation, inclusion and personal growth. For more information
see [7]. An example of these laptops is shown in Figure 4. In addition to the laptops, the
workshop’s hardware was supplemented with SDR equipment, which will be detailed further in
this document.
2.1.1. Signal transmission
During the workshop, images of women of the Institute of Electrical Engineering, focusing on
the ICT field, were transmitted. This transmission occurred directly within the radio spectrum
using an out-of-tree module of the GNU Radio software known as gr-paint.
GNU Radio [9] is a free and open-source software development toolkit that provides signal
processing blocks to implement software radios. An example of a GNU Radio scheme is shown in
Figure 2. It can be used with readily-available low-cost external RF hardware to create software-
defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment. The tool is implemented
using the programming languages Python and C++. It is widely used in research, industry,
academia, government, and hobbyist environments to support both wireless communications
research and real-world radio systems. This fact results in the development of out-of-tree
modules. These modules are available on platforms like GitHub, but they are not included in
the default GNU Radio application. Some modules are added to the main application as they
gain popularity and demonstrate their utility for the general public. Out-of-tree modules can be
easily downloaded and added to GNU Radio. In particular, the gr-paint module was used in the
workshop.
The gr-paint module [10] is a tool for GNU Radio developed by Ron Economos and improved
thanks to contributions from users around the world. The goal of this project is to build a
software-defined OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) transmitter that “paints”
monochrome images into the waterfall of a receiver.
In the workshop, a GNU Radio setup was created employing gr-paint blocks for transmissions.
Preconverted images in TGA format were used. The signals were transmitted around a central
frequency of 500 MHz, with a transmission sampling rate of 1.024 MHz. The transmission
equipment included Ettus USRP B100 and Great Scott Gadgets HackRF One. Tools utilized for
signal transmission during the workshop’s development are accessible in our github repository.
2.1.2. Signal Reception
High school student groups were provided with Plan Ceibal laptops and a RTL-SDR dongle
kit. Figure 3 illustrates the kit given to the participants, which includes various antennas and
Figure 2: EGNU Radio flowgraph example. This example shows two blocks that generate sinusoidal
signals; a block that performs the sum of the first and then a low-pass filter. The last block allows to
obtain and display the frequency representation of the signal resulting from the previous operation.
corresponding connectors, along with the SDR dongle. This device allows for the capture of
analog signal samples received by an antenna, with a USB connection to the computer.
Figure 3: RTL-SDR dongle kit. The SDR dongle, the antennas to be used, and various types of connectors
and brackets for the antennas are shown from top to bottom. The RTL-SDR device in the figure allows
receiving signals with frequencies between 500 kHz and 1.7 GHz. Image retrieved from Amazon.
SDR++ application [8] was utilized for processing the received samples through the SDR
dongle. This application enables the selection of different modulation schemes and the definition
of parameters like the central reception frequency and the sampling frequency. Participants
configured both of these settings and also they adjusted the gain value during reception to
enhance image clarity and contrast. Figure 4 illustrates an image reception.
Figure 4: Example of reception of one of the transmitted images. The image was taken during the
preparation process of the workshop. In particular in this image the woman shown is Eng. Fiorella
Haim.
2.1.3. Coded clues given to students
For the passage between bases, clues were given to the students. These hints referred to some
location within the Engineering Faculty building, with the challenge that the information was
coded. The mechanisms used for coding are listed below:
• Morse Code: Developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail around 1840, it was widely
used for the first long-distance communications using the telegraph [11]. This coding
system assigns to each letter of the alphabet a sequence of dots and/or dashes. The same
mechanism is applied for the ten digits.
• Emojis: These are small drawings that seek to represent gestures or elements of everyday
life (food, animals, sports). They originated in Japan at the end of the last century and
have become more popular over the years. It is common to see games of guessing the
names of movies or places in the world based on a certain combination of symbols.
• Caesar Cipher: Used by Julius Caesar in his correspondence, it is considered a simple
encryption mechanism[12]. As a first step, a number 𝑁 is defined, agreed upon between
those who must be able to encode and decode the messages. Encoding consists of changing
each letter of the message to the letter that is 𝑁 places further down the alphabet. For
decoding, the process is simply reversed.
• ASCII Code: The ASCII code allows encoding letters and numbers with seven-bit binary
words.
• Código QR: This is a mechanism from which links can be obtained by making use of the
camera of a device such as a cell phone. QR stands for quick-response [13].
Table 1 presents the clues used and the corresponding decoding. A brief discussion on these
and other mechanisms of coding information was conducted as an introduction to the workshop.
The students searched the Internet for reference tables or images that allowed them to decode
the information.
Table 1
Delivered clues and corresponding decoding.
Clue Decoding
7th floor
Canteen
Library
Institute of Electrical Engineering
Starting Point
2.2. Workshop development
The workshop lasted an hour and a half (not counting the initial presentation on the career
offerings at the Faculty). It began with a brief discussion on coding mechanisms and a general
explanation of the working materials. Then, the group was divided into four subgroups, each of
which was given a kit for signal reception in the different bases, and they were shown how to
assemble it. Once each group had their reception equipment ready, the first clue to be decoded
was handed out. All the groups followed a different path, passing through all the stations and
ending at the starting point of the activity. Each group was accompanied by a workshop teacher.
The trajectory of one of the groups will be described below. The map with the location of the
tracks along the Faculty is shown in Figure 5.
• On the first floor (where the workshop began) they were given a clue in ASCII code whose
decoding leads to the seventh floor.
• On the seventh floor, the image of the first featured woman is received. After the partici-
pants search for information about her on the Internet, they are given the next clue, in
this case, coded with emojis that leads to the canteen.
• In the canteen, the second image is decoded. A new search is made on the same image
and the next clue, encoded in Morse, is given to them, which leads to the library.
• In the library, they go through the facilities and find the transmitter to receive the third
image. Again, information about it is sought and they are given the next clue, in this case,
coded in QR, which leads to the Institute of Electrical Engineering.
• In the Institute of Electrical Engineering they walk through the facilities and find the last
transmitter from which they receive the fourth image. After a brief discussion about who
that woman is, they are given the Caesar coded clue leading to the start (first floor).
• Once at the place of departure, the kit is put away, the participants are asked to complete
the evaluation surveys, they are given commemorative stickers of the event and a snack is
shared (while they meet again with their classmates who participated in other workshops
of the day).
Figure 5: Map of the Faculty of Engineering with the location of the bases and their corresponding
tracks. It can be seen that during the workshop a good part of the building was toured.
The main results of the first edition of the workshop that took place in April 2023 are
summarised in the following section.
3. Results and Assessment
Over 230 students from 7th to 9th grade and 1st year of high school participated in this activity,
all of them belonging to different economic and social contexts, from both public and private
high schools in Montevideo and the rest of the country. Thanks to the FRIDA Award won in
2018, funding has been provided to cover transportation costs for institutions located far from
the capital. This has been ongoing since 2019, except during the pandemic, when activities were
conducted remotely.
In particular, 40 students participated in the “Code Huntresses” workshop. Figure 6 shows a
series of photographs that were taken during the development of the activity. Moreover, Figure
7 shows a group of teenagers benefiting from the tour to take photos of places that caught their
attention.
Figure 6: Development of the activity. The picture on the top left shows the girls attending the
introductory exhibition. The pictures on the right depict the groups testing the kits according to the
instructions given by the workshop facilitators. The bottom left picture features one of the teenage girls
trying to decode one of the clues by looking up the code information on her mobile phone.
After the workshops were concluded, attendees were invited to participate in a Google Forms
survey to gather feedback and improve future editions of the activity. The survey featured
personal questions, such as the grade they were in and the characteristics of the high school
they attended. In addition, there were questions about the event in general and specifically
about our workshop. Furthermore, the adults who accompanied the teenagers, such as teachers
or school counsellors, were also asked to complete a similar survey.
The survey was optional and was completed by 19 out of the 40 students who attended
our workshop. It is noteworthy that all the participants found the introductory talk about the
different career options offered by our faculty to be of interest. They also rated the activities
they participated in, as well as the topics introduced in them, positively. In addition, they all
expressed that they had learned something new. The results obtained for these questions are
Figure 7: A group of teenagers taking pictures of the beautiful views that can be seen from the faculty
building, especially from the seventh floor, which is one of the bases visited during the workshop.
presented in the circle graphs shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Circle graphs depicting the results obtained for certain questions in the questionnaire.
Over 80% out of the surveyed teenagers said that neither of their parents had attended
university. Out of these teenagers, 75% were enrolled in the public education system. This fact
should not be overlooked when it comes to conveying to teenage girls the possibilities of study
and career development to which they can have access.
Finally, it is noteworthy that 90.5% out of attendees expressed their interest in participating
in the event again next year and 97.7% would recommend the activity to their friends and
colleagues.
4. Conclusions
Year after year, participants have expressed their desire to participate in activities such as the one
we proposed. Most of the girls are delighted to have the opportunity to learn in an environment
different from their school, through experiences with topics that are new and interesting to
them. The impact of the activities, which have been taking place since 2016, is already being
noticed in the new generations that join our Faculty. For instance, two of the instructors who
conducted the workshop in 2023 had participated in the activities proposed in 2017, when they
were still high school students.
The methods of evaluation make it possible to identify areas for improvement for the following
year. Our goal for 2024 is to improve the registration process, with the aim of reaching more
educational institutions and providing opportunities for girls who have never participated in
the activity. Online registration forms will be included and sent along with the event invitation
to encourage the participation of all potential interested girls. In particular, emphasis will be
placed in those who are interested in STEM fields or those who are not sure about what they
would like to study at the tertiary level. Furthermore, some parts of the event, such as the
introductory talk and concluding workshops, will be formalised by reserving special rooms for
them.
Specifically, regarding the "Code Huntresses" workshop, the conclusion of this first edition
is that it is here to stay. However, some areas for improvement were identified, such as the
need to change some of the bases for the treasure hunt. There will be a particular focus on the
discovery of new locations within the faculty, which will have a positive impact on the tour of
the building during the activity.
This instance of dissemination and motivation are highly valuable for both the participating
teenage girls and the teachers and students who plan the activity. The representatives of the
different educational institutions have expressed their gratitude to the organisation and have
expressed their enjoyment in accompanying their students during this activity.
Seeing the excitement of the girls when they arrive at Faculty and their eagerness to learn
makes each year’s work worthwhile. We will continue to break down gender stereotypes,
seeking to have more women in engineering and ICT careers.
To facilitate the replication of the workshop, a comprehensive repository is accessible at the
following link.
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