Julia Huang

Julia Huang studies at Northville High School and is an aspiring pianist and computer scientist interested in coding, piano, and AI.

Julia is passionate about every aspect of computer science and has skills in several programming languages which she has developed ever since taking an 8th grade class that changed her future aspirations. Ever since then, she has developed numerous games, websites, database applications and won many coding competitions, such as winning 41st/150+ participants in the UCF Programming Contest, 2nd place at the state MCWT Web Design Competition, and 3rd place at the Space City Hacks Hackathon (170+ participants). She also loves teaching others through her AI club and hosts and creates problems for coding contests in her software engineering club. In addition, she is the President of the piano club, teaching piano performance, composition, and music theory.

Julia realized there was more to coding and music than just learning and creating. She therefore founded Bytes and Pieces, a youth organization, to share the excitement of her two favourite passions with others. As both fields are highly understudied in schools, she decided to host workshops, contests, and speaker seminars to provide a deeper or extra curriculum that explores topics in coding and music. Julia also hopes to help increase diversity and inclusion, as minorities are highly underrepresented in both fields, and bring its workshops to under-resourced areas and around the world.

In less than a year, Bytes and Pieces has impacted over 400 students in middle school, high school, and college from over 20 states and 30 countries, including from Maryland, Michigan, California, Georgia, India, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Nigeria, Canada, and Brazil. Currently, 75% of students in Bytes and Pieces identify as female, 84% are a member of an ethnic minority, and 30% are international students. Its student base also includes nonbinary students, students of color, students with disabilities, and those from low-income backgrounds.

After mentoring Zoom computer science-related workshops, she hosted contests for students to apply their skills and knowledge, such as the June 2022 HackBytes hackathon and September 2022 Topic Writing Contest. She really hopes to increase and fuel every student’s passions in web development, machine learning, and coding and hopes to inspire them with a unique type of curriculum and learning.

Julia was invited to speak at an Ignite Worldwide webinar in March, the Women in STEM Panel, to talk about her aspirations and interests in computer science as well as Bytes and Pieces and its mission to make computer science more accessible to all. She spoke alongside engineers at Salesforce, Google, and Microsoft to an audience of middle school girls and nonbinary students at five middle schools across the Bethel School District.

Julia wants to help even more students have the chance to develop the relevant skills and knowledge needed to create spectacular projects that can impact the world and pursue immersive career paths. Hence, if she were to win the Global Student Prize, she would use the funds to help pay for and distribute critical computing resources to bring technology knowledge to poverty-stricken and underserved communities around the world, especially for young girls and students of colour, to improve technology education in local communities and around the world.