Miami, March 8, 2017 – Miami Dade College (MDC) invites students, parents, educators, and members of the local tech community to attend Code Art Miami, a digital art exhibition, coding fair, and speaker symposium to encourage more South Florida girls to learn coding skills. Code Art Miami will be at 4 p.m., Saturday, March 18, at MDC’s Miami Animation & Gaming International Complex (MAGIC). The event is free to K-12 students and open to the public.
“Entertainment software companies are a growing source of local employment,” said Maurico Ferrazza, MAGIC Chairperson. “We applaud CodeArt for encouraging young women to enter these fields and welcome Code Art Miami to MAGIC.”
Code Art Miami is CodeArt’s annual event to promote computer science education for all and to bring awareness to the need for more gender diversity in computing fields. Code Art Miami seeks to inspire more girls to code and to help build a supportive network for them and their families.
The event is sponsoring a competition for girls in grades 3‐12 to enter their digital and 3D‐printed art created through coding. Last year nearly 100 South Florida girls entered digital art for the event, which helped raise $7,000 to establish the CodeArt Scholarship for students studying Animation Art or Game Development and Design at Miami Dade College. Proceeds raised at this year’s event will once again go towards funding this MDC scholarship.
Prior to announcing the competition winners, there will be a short entertaining speaker program featuring two women who merge Code & Art in their work – Miral Kotb, founder of iLuminate, and Cassie Tarakajian, co-founder of the digital creative agency Girlfriends and Fellow with the Processing Foundation in New York City. A reception will follow the awards ceremony.
There will also be a Tech Ed Expo at the event — where guests can learn about local Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Mathematics (STEAM) programs and resources and take part in hands-on activities and demos, including the opportunity to create art in virtual reality (VR).
To learn more and reserve tickets, visit www.codeart.miami, or email info@codeart.miami.
About Code Art
CodeArt is a local nonprofit that uses art to inspire girls to code through events and workshops. Similar to how video games are often an onramp to coding for boys, CodeArt finds that learning to create computer-generated art at an early age encourages girls to pursue further computer science studies. CodeArt workshops are open to girls and boys, but the gender ratio is flipped from that of typical coding classes, with about 80 percent of the students being female. For more information about this year’s event, including speakers, sponsorship opportunities, art submission guidelines, and tickets, go to www.codeart.miami.