With the ever changing and advanced technological learning environment reaching out to the students of tomorrow, especially young woman, is key to grasping their interest. This all culminated with the recently held Girls Rock IT event held at Fanshawe.

The overall focus of the day was to get students, specifically 260 Grade 7 and 8 girls from both the local Catholic and public school systems to take a look at some of the options they have available to them within the IT sector. Some of the days sessions included creating a scavenger hunt through the virtual world of Second Life, utilizing Adobe Photoshop to edit out those red eyes and blemishes and make your photograph picture-perfect, and also learning how to protect yourself and your computer from those ever-present “intruders.”

One of the day's participants was Megan Kamphuis a grade eight student at Lester B. Pearson School for the Arts. Kamphuis was attending for her second time and said the day gave her an opportunity to explore what's out there, as well as having some fun.

“Learning about careers for future possibilities and just knowing that in every career computers are used so no matter what career I go into I can always use this knowledge,” said Kamphuis who's future aspirations include either being a doctor or a lawyer.

Getting younger woman interested in the IT sector is key as it is primarily a male-orientated sector.

“The IT enrollment for woman have historically been low, and they really are at the lowest of the low right now, and that's in computer science information technology also to some degree in engineering fields as well too,” according to Kevin Weaver, Chair of the School of Information Technology, which helped put on the Girls Rock IT event. “The overall goal is really to expose them to the field at large, and whether they come here or go to another institution, pick a degree or a diploma, really we just want to get people energized and excited about IT.”

As for the overall success of the event both this year and last has been great according to Karen MacIntyre, a professor in the School of Information Technology.

“The girls were really enthusiastic about it, they really liked it and in fact what they wanted was more sessions. So we decided that we would do it again this year and see what the response was and it's been overwhelming,” said MacIntyre.

Organizers of the event said it will be back next year and there are already looking at suggestions from this year's event to look at improvements for next year.