Students from Newton North HS and Newton South HS have won statewide recognition in the annual Aspirations in Computing program of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT).   In a ceremony at Wellesley College last weekend, Newton South sophomore Hannah Cole was named a Massachusetts winner and national runner-up, and Newton North junior Winnie Chan was named a Massachusetts runner-up.  NCWIT recognizes high-school women for achievements, aptitude, dedication, and leadership in computer science.  Read about the trajectories of these stars:

NSHS’s Hannah Cole		NNHS’s Winnie Chan

Hannah Cole was one of 30 award winners in Massachusetts and a runner-up at the national level.  She started coding with a Scratch course offered by Newton Community Education, became active in the MIT Scratch community, and was appointed by the MIT Scratch Team to be one of five Scratch Community Mentors worldwide to promote computer programming among elementary and middle-school students.  In the last year, she has taught Scratch at the Newton Free Library and worked with the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.  At Newton South, she is taking AP computer science and is president and founder of the school’s two Technovation Club.  For the last two summers, she worked in a cancer research laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine and is interested in pursuing a career combining her love of computer science and biology, possibly in bioinformatics.

Winnie Chan, one of 21 runners-up in the statewide NCWIT competition, first learned coding at the Newton Free Library’s Girls Who Code club and loved it so much that she applied for the 7-week Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program at Google Cambridge.  In this program, 20 high-school students, led by three undergraduate women computer-science students, learned coding and other levels of computer science while building applications that, for instance, choreographed a robot dance, generated random restaurant menus, and created art in the style of Jackson Pollock.  For a final project, her four-student team created Bach to the Basics, a video game that teaches music reading to elementary students.  Her team pitched their application at Google’s Cambridge office and then entered it in the #BUILTBYGIRLS Challenge, where her team was selected as one of five teams nationwide to pitch their applications at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.  At Newton North, Winnie is on a four-student Technovation team that is building an application to enable citizens to monitor their consumption of water, electricity, and other resources.  She also started the Newton North Girls Coding club to counter  gender imbalance in computer-science classes.  In weekly club meetings, she teaches 9 to 12 girls how to code and what she loves about computer science.