Earlier this month, five girls from All Saint’s (including me) went to Edith Cowan University. We learnt about Markov chains, and even had a go at coding them in Python! Now you might be thinking, Taryn, what exactly is a Markov chain? It’s basically a sequence of things where the last thing (it could be a word or event) depends on ONLY the word before it. For example, in this sentence, we know that the words we come after sentence. But we don’t care about the other words before it. If my explanation didn’t make sense, the one below from Harvard might.

After we did some coding, me and other Year 9 students Sunishka and Rebecca experimented with algorithms, to try and deduce whether news articles were clickbait or not, and learnt about real world applications to computer science. The older kids were able to go and listen to a representative from Microsoft, but we were too young for that. Maybe next time?

In conclusion, it was a really fun event! I really enjoyed being in a space with only girls, and I hope I can go again.