Anthony Onesto, a Staten Island businessman, created Ella the Engineer, a cartoon to get girls interested in coding. The show follows Ella solving everyday problems through programming. Onesto is raising $25,000 on Indiegogo to produce a pilot and pitch it to networks.
Welcome back, everyone. Is there a gender imbalance when it comes to those who pursue careers in computer science and engineering? Well, there's a Staten island businessman who says, yes, there is, and he's here. Anthony Honesto. Anthony, welcome.
Thank you.
Anthony, what put this idea in your head? Is there a gender imbalance? You're a father of three kids, two of them little girls.
Sure. Yep.
What makes you think something's wrong?
Well, in the business that I'm in, I recruit, which is advertising. I recruit for technology professionals. Gotcha. And I noticed that there was a huge imbalance within our organization of male to female engineers.
Okay.
And so what happened is I took a look at all the applications that were coming into our organization, and those applications were primarily mail. So the problem existed not in what we were doing, but in the market itself.
What you call the pipeline, Correct?
Exactly. Exactly.
And what do we think that is so far? It's just.
Well, I think it's a number of things. One is, I think at a very young age, girls aren't. There's no hero. There's no person. There's no Persona that they can look at and point to and say, that's who I want to be in this kind of field. All right, gotcha. Engineering in the computer science field.
All right, so you want to fix that, you said? I do.
Yes, absolutely.
You have this idea for someone called Ella the Engineer. Tell us about her.
So Ella is a cartoon concept. We're trying to raise money to produce it, but essentially, Ella will go through episodes of challenging software engineering issues or software coding issues. So her small little town will have a problem, let's say, with a traffic light that's run by software, and they call in Ella to fix it. And so every episode, she will fix something through her skills in software engineering.
It would seem to me, like, I guess most big thinking topics is hard to, like, break it down, to kind of draw in the little girls. I mean, you give that thought, I guess, like, because when you say write code, I'm like, what exactly?
Well, it's actually. Code is a lot simpler than we think, so we can bring it down. And there's a lot of effort right now in the market, in the engineering market, to do this kind of thing. So we're going to make it as simple as possible, make it fun, but also show kids that their everyday objects, like a light, like a. Like a traffic light, is run by software. They'd be very surprised at that.
Okay. All right, good. And you say you're teaching yourself code now.
I Am. I am. Actually. I'm taking some coding classes.
Okay. How's that going?
It's pretty well so far. Through the day. Job and making cartoons. There's not enough time in the day. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Well, you have your own little focus group. Tell me about your little girls and whether you see that this could work or spark some interest in them.
Of course. So what I did is I informally. I looked at what they were looking at. So what programs were they watching? And I noticed a gap. There was no female heroine that. That did software coding. And so when talking with them, they get very excited about, you know, shows like Doc McStuffin, which is a doctor profile.
Right.
So there was definitely a gap there specifically in their lives. And so they got excited about. They loved the idea. Of course. Ella, who's my youngest. Yeah. Is the namesake, so she loves it even more.
She loves that anymore. Okay. All right. Now let's talk a little bit about the money you need to raise. It's Indiegogo, which people think of like sort of Kickstarter. You were explaining.
Yes.
Okay, good. There's a deadline. Tell us about that process a little bit and how people could help.
Sure, sure, absolutely. On Indiegogo, it's Ella the engineer is the campaign, and we're looking to raise $25,000. And what that will do for us is actually take Ella to concept. So building storyboards, building animation, actually producing the first episode that we can then go to networks and see if they would be interested in it. So the 25,000 gets us production, animation, all the stuff you need to create an animated first episode.
We've done some stories on the debrief where there are those who feel that in general, in terms of education, we're not doing enough when it comes to computer sciences and engineering at a younger age. Are you hearing that from parents? Do you feel that yet? I know your children are still young, but even broadly speaking, do you think that's something that just needs more focus?
Absolutely, I think it does. I mean, there are organizations out there. We just recently partnered with Girl Develop it on the Ella Project, which is an organization that trains and puts girls through boot camp. Engineering boot camp.
Interesting.
For software coding. Code.org is another organization, although we're not partnered, but they're focused on getting in to the grade school levels in terms of coding. So absolutely, there's a need. There are a lot of folks that are focusing in this area. There just doesn't seem in the media space to be that. That. That focus just yet.
If you think there's something there? Obviously, Anthony wants you to go on. And you know what? We hope you come back and update us on this because this obviously seems like something that, you know, is worth looking into. Right. Great.
Absolutely. I believe so. Thank you.
Okay, good. And best to Ella at home.
Thank you very much.
That's going to do it for this week's Steve Reef. Remember to follow us on our social media. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all of that. And we'll see you next time. Have a good week.
