Co-Founders Wanted, Girl Develop It and cheap tickets to Wharton’s Entrepreneurship Conference [Event Highlights]

Good morning Philadelphia. Happy Monday to you and the Giants fans in your your life.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, we’re all counting down to pitchers and catchers, right? Before you dust off your Chase Utley there are lots of technology events happening in Philadelphia to keep your mind off of the Winter doldrums.

Also, before we get to the events, the kind folks at the Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference have extended a discount for Technically Philly members to attend the conference. The promo code “tech5off” will give you $5 off, bringing the “professional” ticket to $80. Buy your tickets here.

This week: find your co-founder in Philadelphia (not King of Prussia), learn HTML/CSS and shop our user groups.

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First Lego League: youth robotics championship tournament held Saturday at Penn

Photos by Matthew Albasi and Erica DePascale for Technically Philly.

Hotdog hats, bright white lab coats and Rosie the Riveter costumes set the atmosphere Saturday for the Penn First Lego League Championship Tournament, held in the Irvine auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania Saturday.

FLL, a robotics program designed for kids ages 9 to 14, aims to get young students excited and involved in science and technology. Fifty-two teams from across the tri-state area traveled to University City to participate in FLL’s annual championship tournament after advancing in regional qualifying rounds in December. Like elsewhere in the region, the City of Philadelphia’s School District is grappling with the need for strong STEM education.

This year’s theme was ‘Food Factor Challenge’, where judges evaluated elementary and middle-school teams on three events.

“It’s basically an exhibition of elementary and middle school students to show what they’ve learned in the area of robot design, core vales, project presentation and robot performance,” said Kendrick Davis, the head judge advisor.

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This week: finally learn to code [Event Highlights]

This is a special development edition of Event Highlights. If you made it your New Year’s Resolution to learn how to code, this week brings three opportunities to learn three different languages.

This week: learn Python, learn how to develop on a Windows phone and then put your Ruby to the test.

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Kurbi, Sizeseeker and Near-Miss Management demo at Philly Tech Meetup

Sizeseeker co-founder Mona Safabakhsh demonstrates her company's measuring process using an XBox Kinect.

Sizeseeker co-founder Mona Safabakhsh stood in front of a hundred people in her pajamas and began flailing her arms around.

It wasn’t a bad dream, it was the night’s only live demo. Safabakhsh, along with co-founder Ian Campell, were demonstrating  Sizeseeker, the fledgling Wharton-born company that helps users find their clothing size using an Xbox Kinect.

The first Philly Tech Meetup of the new year kept the now-familiar format of last year: startups meet at the University City Science Center’s Quorum space and each get 20 minutes to present and launch their new startup to a room packed with the city’s technology community. Each demo is followed by a brief question and answer session and the night is capped off by a happy hour at nearby Mid-Atlantic.

After the jump, we offer recaps of each company: Kurbi, Sizeseaker and Near-Miss Management.

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Hive 76 and Hactory hackathon for interactive displays at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibit

Tim Bieniosek, of the Hacktory, explaining his plans for LED matrices, at Saturday's art hackathon.

Arduino boards, Kinects and LED matrices littered the tabletops. UV laser pointers and photochromatic powders were being mixed like magic potions inside Hive76′s Spring Garden studio space this weekend.

The Hacktory and Hive76, two Philadelphia-based DIY groups, joined together for a hackathon on Saturday to discuss their upcoming installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for its After Dark: Turned On exhibit.

Turned On focuses on Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Pittsburgh-born black artist who studied at PAFA in the 1880s. Hive76 and the Hacktory will be creating the interactive exhibits that will be on display.

“We’re exploring themes of transcendence, light as a metaphor for mystery and making the invisible, visible,” said Stephanie Alarcon of the Hacktory.

The resulting projects will allow visitors to draw with light-sensitive ink and lasers and also play with an interactive projection. Their goal is to provide a fun, safe and educational piece that teaches visitors the importance of technology in art and society.

“We want to take a more modern look at the historical context of Tanner’s work,” said Alarcon.

Game Jam, ONA and Philly Tech Meetup [Event Highlights]

Happy Monday, Philadelphia. We hope you enjoyed the pretty-but-not-inconvenient snowfall we saw this weekend.

Just in time for you to dust off your car and shovel your sidewalk, here are our reccomendations from our always-packed event calendar: Listen to local startups, save TV news and make a video game.

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Girl Develop It, TP Groups and PSL’s new prez [Event Highlights]

Hello Philadelphia. It’s actually Winter out there now.

You can stay warm with hot chocolate or that new coat you purchased, but nothing warms the soul like hanging with your local tech community. Lucky for you, we have a packed event calendar.

Our picks this week: get happy with Girl Develop It, get familiar with Philly Startup Leaders and mingle with the city’s user groups.

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RedSnakePhilly 2012: a collaborative conference between the competing languages Python and Ruby

Like the fan bases of sports teams, the communities that follow competing technologies can get in each other’s faces.

There’s examples that stretch to the origins of personal computing: Apple vs. Microsoft, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash vs. HTML5. Fire any of those into your search pane for a history.

The same is often true of competing programming languages and frameworks, like Python and Ruby.

An event that came together last year took the rivalry head on: RedSnakePhilly. It’s an annual conference of alternating lightning presentations that show off the two languages, together, in one room. This playoff season, try that with your friends that identify as Steelers fans.

This year’s upcoming February 21st event is free, and has limited seating. The organizers say to follow @redsnakephilly on Twitter for details on how to secure a seat.

Mat Schaffer, one of RedSnake’s organizers from the “red” camp of Ruby fans, compares the rivalry between Python and Ruby enthusiasts to the political spectrum. “We’re like the democrats and republicans of dynamic languages,” he says.

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The Facebook of 1776, Web Start Women and Philly.rb [Event Highlights]

While January 1st marked the “official” New Year celebration, Event Highlights considers this year the first week of 2021. Our calendar has finally recovered from the holiday break and this week, it’s packed to the brim.

This week: Philly.rb has RedSnake tickets, Starbucks has never been so useful, and what would George Washington do?

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NetTuesday, Corzo Center and more [Event Highlights]

Happy New Year, Philadelphia. Our resolution? To keep covering the people that make the Philadelphia technology community amazing. Before we get to the tech events, don’t forget that today is the NHL Winter Classic at Citizen’s Bank Park. The game starts at three, so we suggest you take a very long lunch.

Events this week: a meta meetup, crowd-sourcing social media and get help with your business.

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