#FemTech Futures Hackathon Fun

On Friday 15th March, our New York and Toronto centres hosted a hackathon event called #FemTech Futures, with the goal of supporting and encouraging young women to pursue their dreams of a future in technology. The hackathon was open to female students from local universities and was a huge success. The event led off with welcome remarks from FDM as well as representatives from our event collaborator, HSBC. Both offices were connected through video conferencing along with HSBC’s Mexico City location, which was a great way to involve all three cities and add an interactive element to the event.

Breakfast was served to attendees as HSBC’s Americas Head of HSS IT Laura Rubin-Rieck and FDM’s own Senior Vice President of Training for North America, Laura Finneran, spoke about their journeys as women in tech to New York attendees. Over in Toronto, Maryna Marchanka, FDM’s Canadian University Partnership Manager and Alastair Angus, HSBC’s Head of Global Banking & Markets IT also welcomed attendees. After ice breakers, team groupings and introductions, our teams were ready to get down to business and begin coding.

Participants were challenged to create and implement a Finite State Machine-based (FSM-based) wayfinding strategy for a Finch Robot to successfully navigate through different mazes. The task allowed the participants to utilise their object-oriented programming skills, as well as their understanding of object-oriented concepts like States and Events, in order to produce the best solution design.

After an exciting and competitive robot showdown, both our New York and Toronto locations got to experience informative career workshops led by key HSBC representatives, Sheryl Wang, Jay Wu, Alfred Yau and Alastair Angus. It was a great way to network and extend advice to these future women in tech. The winners walked away with prizes of Hummingbird Robotics kits, Amazon gift cards and tons of other goodies. It was a day full of fun for women in technology.