Why Google’s Made With Code is Helping Women Get Into STEM for Earth Day

Read how Google's Made With Code is helping women get into STEM in honor of Earth Day. The oceans say thank you.
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David McNew

To celebrate Earth Day, Google’s Made with Code, an initiative which launched in 2014 to inspire millions of girls to learn to code, paired women from three NGOs (World Wildlife Fund, The Ocean Agency, and the Jane Goodall Institute) in conversation with three badass student scientists whose inventions are saving the earth, one oil spill, banana peel, or supercapacitor at a time. Along with a new project from Made with Code, where girls can code their own environmental awareness statement and share it online with the world, these conversations show how science, technology, engineering, and math come together to help combat environmental challenges.

Here, we paired Dr. Ruth Gates, a coral reef specialist and a longtime friend of The Ocean Agency, with Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, a freshman at Harvard who engineered a cement that prevents oil spills before they happen, to talk about their journeys in STEM.

Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna: In high school I worked on some research dealing with cement and concrete. Through this research, I was able to sufficiently apply a lot of the knowledge I accumulated to oil well cementing. The motivation behind that was trying to mitigate causes of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, which injured 9 people.

Dr. Ruth Gates: During my career I went through my training from PhD working on the north shore of Jamaica, to post-docs at UCLA, and was lucky enough to get a job at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I am now director of the facility that I operate. My collaborations right now are really embedded in many of these amazing organizations that are coming on board, that are applying technology to the problems that we as scientists have been studying for years. The technology is radically increasing our understanding of the systems. Can you tell me a little bit more about your technology?

AU:[In the 2010 spill], research has found that it was actually an inadequate cement seal that caused oil to leak throughout the drill, which caused a blowout. My goal was to engineer a novel cement that would maintain the integrity of the cement. I did that by adding a clay to it, because the clay could potentially increase the flow properties [of the cement]. By testing the cement modified with that clay under high pressure, we found that the results that we were looking for were positive, and it supported the use of these clays for stable off-shore drilling. It was great to see how a material that you think is simply just rocks and water could have a huge application like it did.

RG: What sort of extent of damage is caused by oil spills in the ocean?

AU: There's a lot of damage. It's not even just the ocean — there’s environmental damage, fish are affected, economies are affected. We're still trying to figure out viable ways to clean these oil spills. We see how organisms are affected for years to come after they happen. It's very destructive to an ecosystem and to the environment. Finding ways to prevent them is very important. Thinking about more applications like fracking, which also uses a similar type of isolation mechanism, often times it gets a really bad rep because fracking solutions, which have a lot of chemicals, seep into water. There are ways to make energy more renewable, and find clean energy, but for now we haven't identified a viable method that can be used on a wide scale. So while we are transitioning to these new methods, we still need energy now.

RG: What you're really talking about adapting to the fact that we are doing these practices, and they're probably not gonna stop. Improving the existing practices is a really far-wanted message. In the field that we're sort of focused on, with the Ocean Agency and the reef project, we're really realizing that we've driven the decline of the coral reefs because of the increasing loads of fossil fuels, or CO2 as a result of fossil fuels in the atmosphere, which is driving up the [ocean] temperature and coral is very sensitive to those temperatures. It's an amazing technology challenge just to visualize the response of an entire ecosystem over the planet. There's a lot of discussion of how we move forward from there, in sort of moving the needle towards a better outcome for coral reefs.

AU: We're sort of forced to learn how to use it to solve many problems, not just science problems, not just environmental problems, but problems across many disciplines. In my specific research we were able to use something called a rheometer to mirror the environmental factors that cement undergoes when it's being pumped down into an oil well. Because we have this technology we were able to get insight on the properties, on how this cement works, even though we're not actually going into the ocean and testing it out in an offshore drill, which is a little more difficult.

RG: For us, the way that technology comes into play is that we're trying to look at ecosystems over very large spatial scale. Originally, the scale of what you could tell spanned across 10s of kilometers, 100s of kilometers, and now there's satellites going in that can reduce that scale down to 1 kilometer or below, which gives us much more information about what's going on. That information is then interpreted and fed through extraordinary computer algorithms that allow us to take that information from this huge data stream and bring it back information that's usable. The rates at which that information is becoming usable is also increasing because the computational technology and the computer coding is actually improving so dramatically, that you're closing the time gap over the acquisition of information and the generation of knowledge.

AU: One thing that I do hope to do at Harvard before I graduate is take the Introduction to Computer Science class. Understanding how to code, understanding how to use technology at our fingertips, I think it's something that everyone should know how to do.

RG: I feel like a bit of an idiot when it comes to coding. I run a lab with a lot of students who are working in the program, and we engage with a lot of young people and particularly, an extraordinary number of young women who are coming into the sciences now. They know so much more about the capacity to render information from data than I do. Do you feel like there's a very large number of women coming into the biology-engineering interface now?

AU: I have friends who are interested in different forms of biology, but I am the only black female I know that is interested in bio-engineering. Even going into advising, there's mostly men in the room. There's not many prospective female bio-engineering concentrators.

RG: Is there something that happened for you that really that kind of triggered your interest in bio-engineering?

AU: I was fortunate to have teachers who wanted me to step outside of my comfort zone. [In high school] I began to do research and look at articles and I came across one dealing with cement. That’s how I started working with cement in 10th grade. I think a good way to ensure that girls are aware of what is out there and to ensure that they can pursue STEM is to get them exposed to it before college. I've been really passionate about making sure that there are black girls in STEM. But often what happens is that they don't have the access in elementary school and high school to even take adequate classes or to have the opportunity to think about research projects.

RG: You and I are talking about oil spills, we're talking about fracking, about the destruction of the world's coral reefs, and how different skill sets are needed to solve it. It's okay to be outside of your comfort zone, and it's okay to feel like it's difficult, and it will be because life is quite difficult.

AU: I think many students don't realize that so many disciplines intersect and just become even more intertwined as time goes by. I think we're still trying to balance the linear paths that our parents may have taken versus what's available to us now. We probably will have multiple careers under our lifetime. I think that also [it] is important to teach children that you don't have to do just one thing, that you can be passionate about many things — and that you can most likely blend those passions together. People who like TV and computer science, can maybe blend those together—there's so many ways to blend seemingly opposite things together.

RG: The last thing that you touched on was the access piece. One of the reasons I'm deeply attracted to The Ocean Agency is because they're all about acquiring a lot of really compelling imagery and then distributing it in a fairly simple methodology and partnering with Google to get that imagery out the door to as many people as possible. There are so many opportunities to convene technology around this issue of access, to make sure that everybody experiences the things that will drive their passion later in life. That is a key issue moving forward if we're going to be able to keep up with the challenges that we're trying to embrace in our environment right now.

Visit www.madewithcode.com to code your own personalized statement in support of the critical work of World Wildlife Fund, The Ocean Agency and the Jane Goodall Institute.

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