Communications of the ACM
Hacker Shaking Up the Tech Industry, One Hackathon at a Time
Says Awofisayo, “I really focus on entrepreneurial, innovative ventures that focus on women’s empowerment and empowerment of marginalized communities, whether that’s Black individuals, low income, people in rural areas, anything like tha
Credit: Jenny Chang and Damilola Awofisayo
Damilola Awofisayo hasn't always been a fan of STEM. As a matter of fact, she thought it was useless at one point in her life. When she was 7 to 11 years old living in Nigeria, the technology was not dependable. "Nigeria had a society where we didn't have stable electricity, we didn't have a lot of computer science exposure, anything like that," she says. "So I really saw technology as something that was not really needed because I didn't really see it in my day-to-day life."
She didn't find that love for tech until moving to the United States, where she attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. There, computer science classes were mandatory. She learned that technology could be used as a tool to solve problems in society by applying her own unique experiences and background.
Now a Duke University freshman, Damilola Awofisayo, 18, is the founder of TecHacks, an all-female and non-binary student virtual hackathon. It is a weekend to weeklong event where groups of people come together with multiple levels of computer science skills to solve problems by creating apps, software, websites, and other programs.
From Yahoo! News
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