The Ada Lovelace event brings AI to 10-year-old girls in Misiones: a bet on who will design the next technology

By Canal Doce Misiones · October 3, 2026.

This Saturday, the Escuela de Robótica Misiones, based in Posadas, was one of more than 100 Latin American venues taking part simultaneously in the 5th Latin American Ada Lovelace STEM Workshop Day. The program brought together girls aged 10 to 12 for activities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In Misiones, the challenges revolved around the density of liquids and a first encounter with artificial intelligence, designed to be solved without any prior technical knowledge. The institution's general coordinator, Araceli Vera, highlighted the hands-on approach of the day.

The program's name is no accident. Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British mathematician, worked alongside Charles Babbage on the analytical engine and produced what many historians of computing consider one of the first algorithms designed to be executed by a machine. That a day devoted to bringing girls closer to technology bears her name is not a decorative detail: long before the software industry existed, Lovelace was proof that algorithmic thinking has no gender. The program uses that figure as an implicit argument, not merely as a tribute.

Broadly speaking, this kind of initiative responds to a problem the sector has been documenting for years: bodies such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum have repeatedly pointed out that women remain a minority in STEM fields and, even more markedly, on the technical teams that design and train today's artificial intelligence systems. That is no minor matter when those systems already decide who is granted a loan, which résumé clears a first filter or which medical diagnosis is prioritized. A field that is building the tools that will organize much of the economic life of the future, and that recruits mostly from one segment of the population, carries built-in biases before a single line of code is even written.

This is where this apparently modest piece of news connects with something deeper. The thesis we hold at Zendoric is that AI, in the long run, can free up time and generate an abundance of resources; but who designs that technology determines whom that abundance works for and on what terms. If the teams building the models remain demographically narrow, the risk is not only one of symbolic representation: it is that the systems inherit blind spots about half the population that was not in the room where the design decisions were made. Programs like Ada Lovelace do not close that gap on their own —a single Saturday workshop is no substitute for a university degree or a hire— but they act on the variable that weighs most over a ten-year horizon: early curiosity determines which careers are chosen at eighteen.

It is best not to oversell the scope of the figures: this was a one-off workshop, replicated at more than 100 venues across the region, with no long-term impact measurements detailed by the source. Its value lies not in what it solves today, but in the accumulation: sustained initiatives of this kind, year after year, are what change, over a decade, who sits down to design the models we will all use. That is the time scale on which gestures like this one, small when viewed in isolation, end up truly mattering.