R Girls Open Event 2025

Forwards members Heather Turner and Ella Kaye were invited to attend the “Data Science for Girls” open event hosted by R-Girls at Green Oak Academy, Birmingham, UK on July 9 2025. They joined other guests from Ascent and Health Data Research UK to find out how students at this girls’ school have been using R.

From left to right: Yanica Said (Ascent), Heather Turner (Forwards), Nazma Lakdawala (Teacher), Razia Ghani (Head Teacher), and Ella Kaye (Forwards) at the R Girls Open Event

Below Heather and Ella report on this event.

Website Presentations

The day started with an assembly of Years 7-9 (ages 11-14, around 50 students), the school teachers and guests. Students from Years 8 and 9 (age 12-14) presented websites they had created with Distill as part of their Year 8 IT lessons.

The girls had worked in small groups to design a website for a fantasy online shop. This allowed a lot of creativity in designing logos, selecting photos and writing marketing content. The students revealed their love of makeup, fashion, animals, and more. Some highlights for us were a sweet treat shop (very professional-looking!), a site about snow leopards (presented with great humour!), and a shop promoting Afghani fashion (beautiful photos!).

Each group gave a short speech and with a live demo. We were impressed that the girls had got to grips with GitHub as well as editing the R markdown source.

Computer Practical

After a break, we joined a lesson being taught by Anisa Nawaz to Year 7 students. It was only their second lesson using R and they were learning how to create sequences with seq(), working in an R markdown template.

Along with other guests, we assisted by helping the students to trouble-shoot issues. Understanding how to generate decreasing sequences with a negative by argument required a bit of thinking, while breaking R markdown chunks by typing code in the wrong place caused some practical issues. But the girls did well!

Summary

Overall, we were happy to see the enthusiasm from both staff and students in using R to support the girls’ studies. There is a lot of pride in this activity, as demonstrated by the display that greets you when you walk in:

A noticeboard visible on the facing wall, looking through an open door. On the board, a display with a flowery border, titled 'R-Girls Schools Network', followed by the pink R Girls logo. The display has examples of code and graphs, plus large text boxes with information.

The R Girls display right inside the main entrance

Hopefully this experience gives the girls a positive view about using R or other languages, that they can build on in the future.

--- title: R Girls Open Event 2025 author: - name: Heather Turner - name: Ella Kaye date: "2025-07-31" categories: [community] description: "Report of the Data Science for Girls open event 2025." draft: false --- Forwards members Heather Turner and Ella Kaye were invited to attend the "Data Science for Girls" open event hosted by [R-Girls](https://greenoak.bham.sch.uk/r-girls-school-network/) at [Green Oak Academy](https://greenoak.bham.sch.uk/), Birmingham, UK on July 9 2025. They joined other guests from [Ascent](https://www.ascent.io/) and [Health Data Research UK](https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/about-us/) to find out how students at this girls' school have been using R. ![From left to right: Yanica Said (Ascent), Heather Turner (Forwards), Nazma Lakdawala (Teacher), Razia Ghani (Head Teacher), and Ella Kaye (Forwards) at the R Girls Open Event](group_photo.jpeg) Below Heather and Ella report on this event. ## Website Presentations The day started with an assembly of Years 7-9 (ages 11-14, around 50 students), the school teachers and guests. Students from Years 8 and 9 (age 12-14) presented websites they had created with [Distill](https://pkgs.rstudio.com/distill/) as part of their Year 8 IT lessons. The girls had worked in small groups to design a website for a fantasy online shop. This allowed a lot of creativity in designing logos, selecting photos and writing marketing content. The students revealed their love of makeup, fashion, animals, and more. Some highlights for us were a sweet treat shop (very professional-looking!), a site about snow leopards (presented with great humour!), and a shop promoting Afghani fashion (beautiful photos!). Each group gave a short speech and with a live demo. We were impressed that the girls had got to grips with GitHub as well as editing the R markdown source. ## Computer Practical After a break, we joined a lesson being taught by Anisa Nawaz to Year 7 students. It was only their second lesson using R and they were learning how to create sequences with `seq()`, working in an R markdown template. Along with other guests, we assisted by helping the students to trouble-shoot issues. Understanding how to generate decreasing sequences with a negative `by` argument required a bit of thinking, while breaking R markdown chunks by typing code in the wrong place caused some practical issues. But the girls did well! ## Summary Overall, we were happy to see the enthusiasm from both staff and students in using R to support the girls' studies. There is a lot of pride in this activity, as demonstrated by the display that greets you when you walk in: ![The R Girls display right inside the main entrance](r_girls_display.jpeg){fig-alt="A noticeboard visible on the facing wall, looking through an open door. On the board, a display with a flowery border, titled 'R-Girls Schools Network', followed by the pink R Girls logo. The display has examples of code and graphs, plus large text boxes with information."} Hopefully this experience gives the girls a positive view about using R or other languages, that they can build on in the future.