Girl Geek Academy partners with Deloitte Digital and 99designs to run Year 10 work experience program

Girl Geek Academy has partnered with Deloitte Digital and 99designs to launch a week-long work experience program for year 10 students.

Kicking off next week at OneRoof, a women-centric coworking space in Melbourne’s Southbank, the program will see 40 girls from Korowa Anglican Girls School spend two days learning from industry experts to hone their skills and two days building a startup in teams of three before pitching back to their cohort on Friday.

Sarah Moran, cofounder and CEO of Girl Geek Academy, said that with entrepreneurship and tech skills key to the future of work for the next generation of students, the organisation wants to give kids a head start.

“Gone are the days of running around getting coffees. We’re making sure students actually have the opportunity to experience work, and that the opportunities are immediately relevant and aligned with what young people are telling us they want and need to experience in these programs,” she said.

Liana Gooch, deputy principal of Korowa Anglican Girls School, added that, along with key skills, the program will allow students to spend quality time getting to know women in STEM and the startup ecosystem.

“We are keen to ensure our students see the relationship between the STEM skills learned in the classroom and their practical application in the real world,” Gooch said.

“It’s exciting to collaborate with industry professionals to bridge that gap and showcase what a career in technology actually looks like.”

Girl Girl Academy hopes to roll out the program in schools across Australia next year.

Also working to teach students tech skills is Microsoft, which earlier this year partnered with organisations including startup Indigital, Shared Path, and the Eastern Zone Gujaga Aboriginal Corporation to launch an initiative to teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students about their local culture and language as they learn tech skills.

Aiming to help language groups preserve and promote their culture through technology, while also equipping students with digital skills, The Njulgang Project first launched as a pilot program in June in partnership with the NSW Department of Education, with 20 students from five primary schools across south western Sydney attending four workshops.

Here they learned from Dharawal Elders and, using tools such as Paint 3D and Minecraft, created an augmented reality app to bring to life a Dharawal Dreaming story.

We had a chat with Sarah Moran about the work of Girl Geek Academy on a recent episode of the Startup meet Corporate podcast.

Image: the Girl Geek Academy team. Source: Supplied.