This past July, MantisEDU partnered with Cool Girls. Cool Girls is a program founded by Dawn Smith in 1989 to redirect the misguided plight of young girls living in the East Lake Meadows housing community in Atlanta, GA. Through their program, Cool Girls provide young ladies with the tools they need to build character, self-awareness, and self-love. Cool Girls, through multiple partnerships, also provide a strong foundation for which disadvantage young ladies can elevate not only socially but educationally as well.

The partnership between MantisEdu and Cool Girls provided the young ladies with a hands-on learning clinic involving Scratch. Scratch is a block-based visual programming language that targets children primarily. MantiEdu incorporating their sensor technology with the code writing software, introduced the group to the amazing world of coding. The program allowed the young ladies to learn about the behind the scenes world of technology, giving them a better understanding of how things such as games and mobile applications are created.

With the guidance of MantisEdu’s CEO Laron Walker, the participants were given detailed explanations for how the Scratch tool works and the importance of each piece use to create technological codes. During the session Mr. Walker demonstrated how combining Scratch coding and the MantisEdu sensors could produce a function application that was a solution to a real life problems. The introduction of coding to these young ladies addressed the need for the continuance of introducing young women of all backgrounds to the vast aspects of technology. The Cool Girls and MantisEdu partnership was a success. It broadened the imagination of those who participated, it introduced an aspect of technology many of them were not familiar with, and it allowed them to envision aspirations that extended way beyond the common goals they are presented with every day.