Since 2017, The Digital Hub has been in partnership with Teen-Turn. Teen-Turn is a volunteer-led, registered charity that works with organisations throughout Ireland to provide STEM career role models and hands-on experience to teen girls from underserved communities in order to address industry social inclusion, gender disparity and skills shortage challenges.
Teen-Turn aims to provide teen girls the opportunity to gain hands-on STEM experience so that they can visualize themselves in those kinds of careers and therefore make third level course choices accordingly. Through after school activities, work placements, alumnae networking and career development programming, Teen-Turn supports 2000+ girls from “Junior Cert to Job”.
The Digital Hub contributes to the efforts of Teen-Turn’s afterschool programming as well as helps place teenagers in work experience fortnights at technology-based companies at The Digital Hub. Placements guarantee the girls will work on tech related activities during their two-week internship. These placements are part of Teen-Turn’s work to influence course decision-making processes, inform participants on education and career options, and combat stereotypes by strategically changing how girls identify with digital career environments. The two afterschool programmes we support are the Technovation Challenge and Project Squad.
Technovation Challenge
The Technovation Challenge is the world’s largest tech and entrepreneurship contest for girls, proudly supported by UNESCO, Peace Corps and UN Women. It offers girls around the world the opportunity to learn the skills needed to emerge as tech entrepreneurs and leaders over a 3 month programme.
Project Squad
Project Squad runs for 12 weeks and invites teen girls from local area secondary schools to create a science fair project, in keeping with the requirements of both SciFest and BT Young Scientist. The sessions begin with brainstorming and cover research methodology, project management, experimentation/data collection and results reporting.