What Happens When Teen Girls Take Over a Tech Office?
There’s a lot of laughter, a bit of AI, and more confidence than anyone expected.
It’s a Thursday morning in early July, and dozens of teenage girls in bright red Shutterstock T-shirts are doing something quietly subversive in the heart of Dublin: they’re fooling adults and their mates with artificial intelligence. Not maliciously – this is part of the game.
The task: take real images from the internet, recreate them using AI, and then challenge an audience to guess which are human-made and which are synthetic. The result? The crowd was duped more than once. The girls cheered.
Welcome to STEM Inside, a programme run by Teen-Turn. Over the course of several weeks, the participants – most of whom had little or no prior experience with programming – dive into a fast-paced, company-backed curriculum that fuses education with hands-on projects and real-world challenges. One week it’s learning to code and build websites with Dell. Another week, it’s experimenting with AI image generation with Shutterstock. Next it’s coding mini-games with mentors from Riot Games or Accenture.
Each week ends with a showcase: girls present their projects, explain their design process, and, more often than not, surprise even themselves with what they’ve pulled off.
“Before this week I had never written HTML or CSS before,” says Maimuna, one of the participants, during the final presentations. “And honestly I wasn’t sure I’d get it. But Teen-Turn gave me the tools and support to explore it step by step.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking this is just another summer camp with laptops. But STEM Inside offers something far more ambitious — a chance for girls to step into the world of tech and learn directly from the people shaping it. And it’s not every day that teenage girls are welcomed into boardrooms and dev studios – and, most importantly – encouraged to imagine themselves there.
Back at Shutterstock on that Thursday morning, the room hums with noise. There’s laughter, half-eaten pizza, and a steady stream of conversation where talk of AI models and CSS bugs blends easily with school drama and the latest memes.
It’s messy, loud, and full of momentum — part dev stand-up, part teenage chaos. And it raises a simple question: what would the tech world look like if more rooms felt like this?
Interested in learning more about STEM Inside or getting involved?
Contact Alena via email intern@teen-turn.com
