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The inspiring Girls know IT workshop was held successfully for the second time as part of the Women know IT initiative, launched by Microsoft Development Center Serbia. The goal of this initiative is to encourage girls to consider careers in the IT sector and technical sciences, as well as to support them in developing an interest in this field.

The workshop brought together over 30 girls from different schools, including Smederevo Gymnasium, Kraljevo Gymnasium, and the Twelfth Belgrade Gymnasium. The fact that participants came from various cities shows that their interest in the world of technology is growing.

Microsoft Development Center in Serbia (MDCS) hosted the workshop. At the very beginning, representatives from MDCS and the Petlja Foundation welcomed the attendees and introduced the importance of artificial intelligence. The MDCS representatives also presented The Garage—an innovation that is part of Microsoft’s global organization—where the girls later had the opportunity to try out machines and tools used there.

The workshop program began with a quiz designed to help the girls relax and get to know each other. After the quiz, there was a lecture on prompt engineering—a skill of increasing importance in the future—presented by Andrej Bantulic, a student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade. Andrej is also a long-time collaborator of the Petlja Foundation with extensive experience in lecturing and mentoring.

The main part of the workshop was dedicated to finding bugs in games created in the Pygame environment. Since the girls were divided into teams, each team worked on multiple games that contained several intentional errors in the code. Their task was to find and fix those errors. While debugging, they used AI-based tools, including ChatGPT. It was especially emphasized that such tools can be very helpful only if clear and precise questions are asked.

As mentioned earlier, the girls were also introduced to The Garage, which was by far their favorite part. During the visit to this space, they had the chance to see various machines for 3D printing, engraving devices, and other modern tools. They were particularly fascinated by the opportunity to independently create badges and keychains, which they kept as souvenirs, and to learn how ship models were made using 3D printing with the help of Arduino starter kit tools.

Throughout the workshop, the girls talked with Microsoft employees and gained insight into what every day work at one of the largest IT companies looks like. They left the workshop motivated and with a clearer picture of the opportunities the IT sector can offer them in the future.

Members of the journalism section from Smederevo Gymnasium, who wrote an article about this initiative for their school magazine, also shared their impressions of the entire event with us.