Jewelbots Friendship Bracelets Inspire Girls to Pursue STEM

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Sara Chipps, CEO of Jewelbots, a company whose mission is encouraging girls to pursue careers in STEM.

5/23/18 #2130

Excerpt:

"Welcome to my favorite studio in the world. It'll be yours soon too. This is the Tisch WNET Studio here in the heart of New York City and Lincoln Center. It is my pleasure to introduce Sara Chipps, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Jewelbots friendship bracelets, right? Yeah. Help us understand this, and let's immediately talk about what they are, Jewelbots, and also... Yeah. Talk about... there's a whole educational thing with young girls? Yeah, well everything in our world is smart now, right? We have smartphones, and smart homes, so at Jewelbots, we've been working on smart friendship bracelets as a way to inspire young girls to start coding, and the way… Describe coding for... I always... I think I know what it is. What is coding? So coding is the way we tell computers how... what to do. So when I go to a website or when you pay your taxes online, or even the things that live in our homes like our Alexas, they have code on them. And so it's becoming increasingly a big part of our jobs. To write the code? Write the code. You have to...? Okay, the skill set to write code...? Creative? Yeah. Analytical? Yeah. Strategic? Help me understand this. Is it mathematical? Or no? Everyone thinks that. I thought that! Yeah, I think that's... what's a really big misconception, and something that the programmer community has done is convince people it's really hard, and you have to be really good at math, and of course, like any job there's the really hard part of it, like there are some people that work on Wall Street that are quants, and they have to be very good at math. The what? The quants. You mean quantitatively... ana... their analysis quantitatively, it's...? Never mind. Yeah. I don't know what I'm talking about. They're the people that make the money happen. [laughter] Okay, well then... how do you learn to code? How does... our daughter I told you, Olivia's seven, as we're doing this show, she was fascinated by the whole thing, she's like, "Well how do I code?" Yeah, so the way these work, so we talked to a lot of girls just like your daughter, we talked to about 200 girls and we were like, "What would...?" A focus group of 200 girls? Yes. Go ahead. And we said, "What would be exciting to you?" Like, "What would make you want to code?" Because coding is boring, and they were... and what we heard from them is their friends are the most important things in their world. So we were like, "Alright, what if we made a bracelet that lit up when your friends were nearby?" And it would be like, "How do I get that?" And..."