The Ada Scotland Festival is a series of online events focused on addressing the gender imbalance in Computing Science. The launch event takes place online on Tuesday 13th October on Ada Lovelace Day 2020.

The event is open to pupils, teachers, parents, and anyone else interested in addressing the gender imbalance in Computing Science education, and the tech sector more widely.

The organisers, including Dr Ella Taylor-Smith of the Centre for Social Informatics, will discuss the goals of the Festival. Speaker Toni Scullion – the award-winning founder of dressCode and Computing Science teacher – will argue for the importance of shortening the gender gap in Computing Science. There will also be some competitions with prizes to be awarded by the event sponsors. One is a video competition for female students (at school, college or university) on the benefits of studying Computing.

I’m particularly pleased (and proud) to see that Toni Scullion is participating at this event. I supervised Toni’s award-winning honours project in 2008/9 when she was a final year student in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University. Toni still speaks fondly of her time at Napier, and her work for her dissertation, as is evident in a 2019 video – see below. (I particularly like the footage at 5’10” and 5’49”!)