Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019, and is a national leader in the "CSforALL" movement, bringing engaging computer science to students normally underrepresented in the field.

Thanks to four National Science Foundation grants, the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" non-majors course he co-developed has been shared with over 800 high school teachers. He is delighted to regularly have more than 50% female enrollment in BJC, with a high mark of 65% in the Spring of 2018, shattering the campus record for an intro computing course, and is among the highest in the nation! He is humbled by the international exposure he and the course have received in the New York Times, PBS, NPR, and others media outlets. He is working on the BJC Middle School curriculum.

Parinaz is a 15 year old student at Stratford Preparatory High School in San Jose, California. She started Tech Together, an initiative to promote Computer Science education and has been successful in receiving support and collaboration from faculty at UC Berkeley. Parinaz was a speaker at the United Nations - 68th Commission on the Status Of Women Conference held at the UN Headquarters in New York, USA. Parinaz presented her journey in STEAM, Gender Inclusion in Technology and Unlocking the Potential of Girls in STEAM in a panel presentation. She currently volunteers her time on the FEZANA Ava Project where she led a Family Paint Event and created the Perpetual Haftseen Garden Brochure. Parinaz won third place in the Biomimicry Youth Challenge for coming up with CactiShirt: a design to passively cool a person down with a shirt that incorporates microscopic folds, just like desert cacti, to increase the surface area to allow more heat to radiate. There were 125 submissions across 25 countries. She won the Naval Science award for creating a device to help people with aphasia communicate and won the Access Braille Award for creating a device for the blind.

She is a computer science student at UC Berkeley, working as course staff for BJC/CS10 under the supervision of Professor Dan Garcia. She also works as an intern for SAP as part of the Snap! Team. First introduced to computer science through Snap! and BJC, she is a huge fan of both platforms and loves to contribute in whatever ways possible.

I'm currently a Lecturer at UC Berkeley, developer on the Snap!, Snap!Con and BJC Teams.