Category: San Antonio (Page 37 of 62)

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
A drum line performance from the Roosevelt High School Rough Rider band kicked off the seventh annual Girls Inc. of San Antonio Science Festival Saturday at the San Antonio headquarters of Rackspace Hosting.

The Girls Rockit Into the Future Festival is designed to interest girls in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields – commonly referred to as “STEM” fields. The Rackspace parking lot was filled 37 exhibits. Each was designed with an activity, experiment, or demonstration to get kids – and girls in particular — interested in STEM fields.
“There’s a huge lack of women in STEM,” Says Girls Inc. CEO Rhonda Williamson. “Women are half of the workforce, but less than a quarter of science, technology, engineering and math fields, and less than a quarter of computer engineers.”
The nonprofit organization combats the stereotype that math and science are “guy” fields. They do this by creating girl-only environments where there is less social pressure on girls to conform. Williamson says girls are more hesitant to stand out by asking questions or taking the lead on projects when in a mixed gender group.
“When it’s an all girls environment, they are more open towards taking those risks,” says Williamson.
Founded in 2004, Girls Inc. of San Antonio holds STEM camps and does events for local schools. It also sponsors two FFL Robotics teams – team Smart and team Bold. The organization has served around 3,000 young women in the last year, providing both education and a safe haven with hot meals. They also provide scholarships. Williamson hopes to get even more girls interested in the organization by holding science festivals.
“I hope that something inspires them,” says Williamson. “And that’s why they say ‘I want to be this when I grow up, I want to design the next open cloud system for Rackspace, or I want to make a rocket.’”
H. W. Schulze Elementary Teacher Alice Pearish sees Girls Inc. events as extremely important to getting students interested in STEM fields. She hopes to get the non-profit more involved in her school.
“A lot of girls are really good at math also but they hold back from joining those kinds of fields,” said Pearish. “We want them to be engineers and to think higher level.”
Plenty of activities offered the kids hands on opportunities with science experiments and more. Boeing San Antonio, which bankrolled much of the event’s cost, had several activities related to aerospace engineering. Carts demonstrated friction, air guns simulated jet engine propulsion, and three dimensional puzzles provided challenges for critical thinking and motor skills.
Rackspace Hosting, which has hosted the Girls Inc. Science Festival at their San Antonio location for the last three years, set up a series of demonstrations that showed how electricity and circuits work. Kids could play Tetris by touching buttons made out of Play-doh, or play a digital piano by touching bananas hooked up to a laptop.
“We all know there is a big gap in the number of women and girls going into technology, and we want to do our part to show girls that technology is for them,” said Rackspace Community Affairs Specialist Cristina Ruiz. “This a good chance for us to talk to and reach a lot of girls.”
Rackspace was the title sponsor for the event. They contributed volunteer hours and funding for the festival as well as a location.
Sponsor USAA had about 13 different activities at the festival – from engineering buildings with pipe cleaners to building air-powered Rockets to doing chemistry experiments. Around 90 employees volunteered to run the many booths and activities. USAA Bank Systems Executive Director Terry Woodworth says the USAA contribution has doubled since last year. She is excited to be able to connect so many kids with technology.
“When you see their faces, and when you see them use some of these experiments and find out that there is mathematics and engineering behind it, they’re astonished,” says Woodworth. “So if we can just plant a seed with them.. ..we are all going to benefit from that one day.”
Roosevelt High School had several different booths at the event. Its Disco-Inferno robotics team brought the robot they used to compete in the Alamo-First Competition. Kids had the opportunity to control the team’s large Frisbee-launching robot as well as a few small maneuverable bots. The school was also represented by their all-girl Team Eclipse Rocketry Club. Freshman Isabella Leighton, who does the math and statistics for the club, has been interested in math since she discovered she could keep up with it in the fourth grade.
“Since we’re an all girls team, and no one expects us to be able to do all these things, it makes me feel really proud when we achieve what we have achieved,” says Leighton.
Some additional sponsors included UTSA’s CEIG program which promoted microbiology by showing kids slides of benign bacteria, and Valero which taught kids how many common household items were manufactured with petroleum. In one of the more messy experiments, the Witte Museum had a booth showing off magnetic silly putty – a black blob of putty that actively reached for and eventually engulfed a magnet.
Also participating were the San Antonio Astronomical Association, NASA, KLRN, Time Warner Cable, Toyota Texas, and HEB.
At the Festival’s conclusion, 2800 participants had entered the Rackspace parking lot to learn about STEM careers — and 979 of them were girls under 18 years of age.
Regan Shelton, who brought her daughter and extended family to the event for the fourth year, gives Girls Inc. of San Antonio all the credit for getting her daughter interested in technology.
“I can honestly say this is what’s gotten her and them into science — and technology especially,” said Shelton. “Last year I remember her telling me she didn’t know that women could be into technology and electronics.”

Correction: This article originally mistakenly referred to STEM as STEAM.

BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

In the space where Rackspace began, its Co-founder and Chairman Graham Weston dedicated Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy on Tuesday morning.
“You are sitting in an historic place,” Weston said. “Do you know what started right here? Rackspace started here. But another historic thing that happened on this floor is right behind that glass back there were the first three servers of Youtube.”
Weston along with other dignitaries including Mayor Julian Castro, City Manager Sheryl Sculley and Rackspace’s Director of Learning and Development Duane La Bom gathered to officially open the new Open Cloud Academy on the sixth floor of the Weston Centre.
The Open Cloud Academy will be a mirror of Rackspace University, the company’s internal training program, LaBom said. He will be managing the academy. It will teach the general public the same essential cloud computing and system administration skills and technologies that are required to work for Rackspace.
“We’re going to teach our students specifically what they need to know to gain employment today,” La Bom said. “And we are going to do that in an affordable way and a way that makes sense for our students.”
The academy has already started a pilot program with 100 students. These students will be going through the Linux Academy – a division of the Open Cloud Academy that certifies students to be L1 Linux administrators and teaches them the Rackspace system of customer support. Other divisions that will be available in the near future include the Network Security – or NetSec – Academy, the Cyber Security Academy, and the Cloud Computing Academy.
By the end of 2013, Rackspace also hopes to roll out additional divisions to provide training programs in the cutting-edge Ruby and Python coding languages.
Currently few university courses or certification programs exist for many of these much-needed coding languages, Weston said. And programs for Linux certifications are generally long and prohibitively expensive, he said.
“Technical training is very expensive everywhere,” Weston said. “There is really not a place today in the country where people can get training and certifications that are more than just a day or two.”
The Open Cloud Academy will offer courses that span six weeks to eight weeks. The cost will generally be $4000 or less depending on the skills learned.
Mayor Julian Castro is especially optimistic for the new Academy, hoping that it will help put San Antonio on the map as a hotspot for technology and IT jobs.
“San Antonio’s competitive advantage out there is that we are a young city,” Castro said. “We have tremendous numbers of folks coming out of high school, going to community college.. ..that have an interest in IT. And this is a fantastic opportunity for them to get the skills that will make them employable at Rackspace and many other companies in San Antonio and outside of San Antonio.”
In the big picture, the Open Cloud Academy is as important to Rackspace’s continued success as it is to the development of a technological workforce and ecosystem in San Antonio.
Rackspace Hosting spends a lot of money finding personnel with knowledge and skill-sets needed for their business. Increasingly, this means relocating employees from other markets or convincing them to work for Rackspace from home.
“We’re in a war for talent, and our options are we can either buy talent or build talent,” La Bom said. “The short term goal is to help Rackspace fill jobs we struggle to fill because, to some degree, we have tapped (out) the local market for technical skills.”
The academy will produce immediately qualified personnel to work at entry level positions at Rackspace, and the programs require no prior knowledge of IT or cloud computing.
“That’s coming to us with no knowledge of IT and walking out 10 to 12 weeks later with several IT industry standard certifications,” La Bom said.
La Bom estimates that Rackspace will hire around one-third of the students graduating from the Academy. The remaining students will have skills and experience as cloud computing system administrators that enable them to work for other companies or even start their own businesses. Rackspace hopes that these graduates will become customers after they leave.
A great deal of opportunity exists for the graduates. According to an IDC report sponsored by Microsoft, “Needed cloud skills will grow at six times the rate of IT skills overall.”
The report predicted “cloud-related skills represent virtually all of the growth opportunities in IT worldwide and will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015. IDC believes there could be as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs in IT worldwide by 2015.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that IT employment in the United States will only grow at a maximum of 2.7 percent annually, which is a long way from keeping up with worldwide growth.
In addition, training opportunities in cutting edge technologies are also severely lacking.
This is why Rackspace is developing training programs for coding languages such as Ruby and Python – languages required to be on the cutting edge of new apps and programs based on the cloud. There are currently no certification programs for these languages — which makes hiring developers difficult – but Rackspace hopes to have training programs ready as early as the last quarter of 2013.
Geekdom Co-founder and Mentor-In-Chief Nicholas Longo said this is a huge opportunity for advancing both San Antonio’s tech scene and cloud computing in general. Longo said there was previously no real opportunity for developers to quickly learn these job-essential languages.
“You couldn’t walk into a place that needs Ruby, Python, or cloud technology expertise because they don’t teach it. Now we teach it!” Longo said. “You come here, you learn the things that you need to know to get a real job or start your own startup. And you literally get certified with a certificate just like it was a normal vocation.”
Longo believes that the Open Cloud Academy is just the first step of a wave of innovation where technology will be taught and certified like other basic vocations. He and Geekdom were instrumental in putting the event together – creating exposure for the grand opening and holding information sessions for the Academy’s first students. In fact, Geekdom referred most of the pilot students.
One of the students, Tom Hoffman, is attending in the evenings after finishing at his regular job.
“It’s an awesome opportunity,” Hoffman said. “I can’t quit my job to go back to college, but I can do this self-based stuff and attend this open academy at night – re-tool myself with modern skills.”
The first stage of Hoffman’s Linux course involves reading a book, watching online instructional videos, and attending workshops for practice. He looks forward to getting his A+ certification and Network+ certification at the end of the first phase.
The Open Cloud Academy will also seek to specifically target military veterans as students – many of whom are now returning from their tours of duty and are looking for employment in the civilian market.
“We’re really wanting to give those individuals who are wrapping up their military career an option – we’d like to make IT an option for them as they made the decision about transitioning from a military career to a civilian career,” La Bom said.
Rackspace has already started the process of approving their Academy for use with the military’s GI bill. La Bom is hoping to get this approval in the next six months.