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2nd Annual Future Builders Challenge brings students to the stage
This weekend, I attended the 2nd Annual Future Builders Challenge, hosted by Buildertrend, a successful Omaha startup. As Silicon Prairie News’s resident high school student, I had the pleasure of going through the event as a participant rather than an observer, which gave me an opportunity to experience the event hands-on, observe wonderful volunteer speakers,…
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Highlander Code Camp Builds Tomorrow’s Tech Workforce
Teach a kid to code, and they can debug their life. Studies have shown that programming benefits a child’s cognitive development, especially reflectivity and divergent thinking skills, both crucial to creative problem-solving. Learning how to code also helps children enhance their metacognitive abilities, so that they can think about the way they think. Metacognition training…
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Part 2: It’s Time to Address the Racism in Hiring for Tech
“There are two schools of thought: either you believe that your organization functions better with a diverse team, or you don’t,” said Eric Swanson, Happiness Engineer at the Omaha-based WordPress-hosting site Flywheel. “It’s been proven time and time again that, almost unanimously, more diverse teams do better work.” Research backs him up. A report from…
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GETconf promotes gender equity and accessibility in tech
Stefanie Monge is impressed by the outpouring of support from everyone who wants to make tech a more equitable field. Monge is vice chair of the Gender Equity in Tech Conference (or GETconf, for short), a one-day conference amplifying and celebrating the voices of women and gender-expansive workers in tech. “Right now we are about…
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Why more Midwestern tech cos are ‘boomeranging’ talent away from the coasts
As pockets of tech entrepreneurship expand in cities across the Midwest, local companies are coming to find that they need to invest in strategies to keep tech talent in the region, and maybe more importantly, to bring tech talent back home from cities like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. But, what can companies…
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KC STEM Alliance works to close Missouri’s tech talent pipeline gap
According to a report from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, by 2030, Missouri will face a shortage of 200,000 qualified workers. The report outlines a number of additional findings that point back to deficits within the state’s STEM talent pipelines. The KC STEM Alliance is helping to help those gaps by exposing students from all…
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Chicago’s coworking spaces are building more than startup careers
In a city like Chicago with a nearly endless choice of coworking spaces, finding the right one that fits a startup’s needs, wants and values is definitely possible, if not a bit challenging. The Heartland Innovation Road Trip made two stops in Chicago on Thursday to tour coworking spaces with significantly different visions. Chicago’s coworking…
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The Iowan Project recruits tech talent back to their home state
A lot of young professionals dream of leaving their hometowns after graduating high school or college in search of broader career opportunities or new lifestyles. It seems like an inevitable thing, but it’s also a problem for states like Iowa that are losing valuable tech talent to other ecosystems. But what if Iowa could identify…
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dsmHack brings together tech professionals and area nonprofits
Participant spots in the fifth Des Moines Charity Hack on March 22 may have sold out in record time, but nonprofits still have until March 6 to submit their applications to be one of 10 organizations to receive technology solutions from the event. “We’ve seen our events sell our faster and faster each year with…
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High-Tech PR Agencies: The Critical Piece Missing from the Silicon Prairie Ecosystem
In Silicon Valley there exists a handful of firms whose mission is to provide the critical communications’ component for early-stage startups to household name tech brands. Public Relations (PR) is one of the core business communication disciplines that most founders of startups lack, and in most cases, have no interest in. The same holds true…