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Forwards members Heather Turner and Ella Kaye were invited to attend the “Data Science for Girls” open event hosted by R-Girls at Green Oak Academy, Birmingham, UK on July 9 2025. They joined other guests from Ascent and Health Data Research UK to find out how students at this girls’ school have been using R.
Below Heather and Ella report on this event.
< section id="website-presentations" class="level2">Website Presentations
The day started with an assembly of Years 7-9 (ages 11-14, around 50 students), the school teachers and guests. Students from Years 8 and 9 (age 12-14) presented websites they had created with Distill as part of their Year 8 IT lessons.
The girls had worked in small groups to design a website for a fantasy online shop. This allowed a lot of creativity in designing logos, selecting photos and writing marketing content. The students revealed their love of makeup, fashion, animals, and more. Some highlights for us were a sweet treat shop (very professional-looking!), a site about snow leopards (presented with great humour!), and a shop promoting Afghani fashion (beautiful photos!).
Each group gave a short speech and with a live demo. We were impressed that the girls had got to grips with GitHub as well as editing the R markdown source.
< section id="computer-practical" class="level2">Computer Practical
After a break, we joined a lesson being taught by Anisa Nawaz to Year 7 students. It was only their second lesson using R and they were learning how to create sequences with seq(), working in an R markdown template.
Along with other guests, we assisted by helping the students to trouble-shoot issues. Understanding how to generate decreasing sequences with a negative by argument required a bit of thinking, while breaking R markdown chunks by typing code in the wrong place caused some practical issues. But the girls did well!
Summary
Overall, we were happy to see the enthusiasm from both staff and students in using R to support the girls’ studies. There is a lot of pride in this activity, as demonstrated by the display that greets you when you walk in:
Hopefully this experience gives the girls a positive view about using R or other languages, that they can build on in the future.
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