High school girls from across Canada participate in Ottawa hackathon competition

Dozens of girls from across Canada converged on Ottawa for the city’s first-ever ‘hackathon’ to put their coding skills to the test.

Ottawa is hosting its first 24-hour, all-girls game jam for 70 high schoolers from around the country.

Game jams, also known as hackathons, are made up of students teaming up in groups of three to create a video game together from scratch.

The girls will stay up all night coding, collaborating, using their imagination and testing their creativity to potentially become future game developers, engineers and creatives.

The students are starting with no previous experience. They will learn to build the game through trial and error without someone assisting them through the process.

Saara Sherazi says she does competitive robotics and wanted to participate to get better at the craft.

“I wanted the opportunity to program something interesting, design a game of my own with the support of my friends. I’m not very good at coding and I really wanted to just get better and I feel like practice is the way to do that,” Sherazi said.

Organizer Renran Sun says creating a hackathon for high school students is meant to broaden their perspectives and skills.

“They will get to have fun but most importantly, learn through workshops how to code. They will learn CSS, HTML and different engines and languages. At the end, I hope that everyone can build a game that they’re proud of,” Sun said.

Muntra Dadjoo says she decided to participate because she loves coding and took computer science in high school. She was already planning out her strategy.

“When they present the concept to us, I’m going to write down some key ideas in my notebook and sketch out what I want the game to look like. Then, go on Canva and start designing it before I start coding it so that I have all the designs out of the way before I like start coding,” she said.

Organizers say the event shows all genders are capable of excelling in the profession in a heavily male-dominated industry.

Game jams are mainly held in the United States and around the world but there are very few in Canada. This will be the first in Ottawa.

The event takes place at Carleton University from Saturday afternoon to Sunday.

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