Fashioning the Future With: Joy Shi
Riddle us this: what's the most fun and challenging way to connect girls with STEM during a pandemic? Create an online puzzle hunt! That's exactly what today's interviewee Joy Shi did! Joy, a recent high school graduate, is the founder and president of inteGIRLS, a nonprofit organization in the D.C. Metro Area. Joy created inteGIRLS in 2019 to support female and non-binary teens with interests in mathematics. What's more, inteGIRLS is entirely youth-run.
Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, inteGIRLS hosted a wildly successful in-person math competition. But when the pandemic hit, Joy and her inteGIRLS team knew just how to adapt. They came up with the idea for the inteGIRLS 2020 Puzzle Hunt. The event took place from May 31 to June 1 and involved a set of 20 logic puzzles ranging in difficulty. The participation was off the charts! A total of 1,597 girls competed on 598 teams. But wait, it gets better: The participants were from 54 countries and territories, making the inteGIRLS 2020 Puzzle Hunt a big ol' global math party. Problem-solving parsnips, how rad is that?
Speaking of rad, one of the event's participants named Emerald wrote this about the inteGIRLS competition, "Never have I seen so many girls and enby work together to solve puzzles. As I mentioned before, most puzzle/arg games and servers I have been part of have guys as a great majority of the population." Another competitor who goes by Space Girl wrote this, "It was AWESOME!!! Also, there are so many cool people on this forum. Everyone is so nice & helpful. I wish I had a class for math or science just filled from the people here. It would be so awesome." Finally, a participate named Nora summed up the experience quite well, "Dude this puzzle hunt was so fun."
As for what's next for this pioneer of puzzles, Joy will attend Caltech in the fall. She intends to double major in mechanical engineering and business, economics, and management, but Joy notes that her majors are not set in stone. We can't wait to see where Joy goes and what problems she helps solve in the future! We were thrilled to ask Joy all about how inteGIRLS came to be (including the story behind the name!), who inspires her, and how one crafts a great puzzle. Meet Joy Shi, STEM advocate and magnificent math maven!
*Editor’s Update: Joy has semi-settled on a major. She’ll be studying applied and computational math. In addition, there’s good news for future puzzlers! The next Puzzle Hunt is scheduled for just this coming October. Be sure to follow inteGIRLS for news about their new math competition chapters and more!
When did you know you were a scientist?
When I was in fourth grade, I started playing with my brother’s pull-back-and-release cars when I became fascinated with how these cars seemed to power themselves. And from then on, I’d take apart these little plastic cars and rebuild them. We usually only got these when my brother decided he wanted them, but I got my first, very own toy car, at age 9.
What do you love most about math?
I love seeing the patterns in things. And the digging. How you can use every strategy and every concept you’ve ever learned to probe into and solve a brand-new problem.
Math is just so incredibly versatile — words can’t explain how vast and creative it is!
What inspired you to found inteGIRLS?
I am so lucky to have female friends in middle school who introduced me to math competitions — without them I would not be where I am today. If I didn't know any girls on my math team, I wouldn't have joined the team. After participating in math for a few years and ascending through the different levels from local to state to national, the disparity between the number of boys and girls in math competitions grew the higher I went. When I started high school, I became the “only girl.” I realized that by high school, many girls become disillusioned with math competitions and quit, and that many middle school girls stray away from math due to a lack of a community of girls like the one that I fortunately had. inteGIRLS stemmed from a sense of frustration and loneliness in math — and I wanted to do whatever I could to help girls like me in my area — and hopefully beyond.
Even though inteGIRLS was something that I’ve been wanting to create ever since I first started in math competitions, the idea really blossomed when I was invited to participate in Math Prize for Girls, a nationwide all-girls math competition in September 2018. The director of Math Prize, Dr.Ravi Boppana, supported my dream and essentially kickstarted our journey to inteGIRLS.
When coming up with a mathematics initiative in 2019, what drew you to the idea of a puzzle-based competition?
I was still bent on hosting inteGIRLS Math Competition 2.0 this May until I heard the news that our Montgomery College venue was officially closing down for the year due to the pandemic. I still wanted to have a math competition, but online, until I participated in the CS50x puzzle day event and solved my first logic puzzle! From that moment on, I knew that I wanted this year’s inteGIRLS to be puzzle-related. I also envisioned that some girls might be nervous to participate in a purely math-based event as I know many young girls that shudder at the word “math” :( The puzzle hunt concept alleviated the nervousness that many girls may face when participating in STEM events while still testing problem solving and teamwork abilities.
What has been the most unexpected moment you’ve experienced while running inteGIRLS and the 2020 Puzzle Hunt?
My most unexpected moment for inteGIRLS, in general, was the moment I thought of that name. I was on my way home from a travel math competition (where our team name was algeBROS) and I had a eureka moment when inteGIRLS popped into my mind. I still believe so much of the success of inteGIRLS has been because of the name!
For the puzzle hunt, the most unexpected moment was definitely seeing the incredible volume of participants — puzzle-hungry girls that completely flooded our servers and our frantic team members in charge of our help chat.
What has been the most rewarding aspect?
Being able to be on the other side. All of the organizational aspects — running a nonprofit, bank accounts, emails — not even under my own name until recently when I turned 18! But most of all, seeing the response, especially from girls who are experiencing the fun and magic of events like ours for the first time. In a way, a younger version of myself lives vicariously through these girls!
The pandemic forced a lot of changes! What are some of the challenges you and your team faced in coming up with running the event online as opposed to in person?
I mentioned this earlier but we were originally starting up our second annual in-person math competition before the pandemic came in. inteGIRLS Online was different in a few ways: we needed a tech operations director (the incredible Mingjie Jiang), we were looser in terms of budget, and we had the opportunity to reach out to participants worldwide. While these were all plusses, one drawback of an online event is that everything runs on honor. We would like to give all of these girls a fair playing field, but there is no way of enforcing our rules without infringing on other girls’ privacy. We limited prizes to remove the incentive to cheat and required an honor code to help with this — but having an equitable and controlled environment is still much easier with in-person events.
What is your leadership style in heading up your team of 14 other rad students on the inteGIRLS team?
Yes!!! The team is definitely rad :) I would say that I got lucky with this group — every single person was just as invested in the cause as I was! One thing that I found to be really effective was to give everyone lots of freedom. Since we’re introducing a never done before concept (puzzle hunts for teen girls!!!), any and all ideas were welcome. Another thing was our selection process — I tried to make sure everyone on the team had a friend or some sort of connection to soften the icebreaking process. And while I personally have not met a majority of our team in person yet, we’ve all grown into a group of puzzle-creating-and-solving friends :)
What is the most rewarding aspect of creating a puzzle with your peers for your peers?
Watching them suffer through the hard parts and prevail! It’s always vindicating when a terrific puzzle solver cracks the cryptic workings of the puzzle writer’s crazy brain :)
Do you have a favorite puzzle from the 2020 Puzzle Hunt?
One of my favorite puzzles also happens to be one of the least solved puzzles from the hunt: Locations United, written by my friend Laura Yao. Even though we marked it as an easy puzzle, many of the top teams, who coasted through our hard puzzles, struggled to get the answer.
What is the process like for successfully writing a logic puzzle?
I only wrote one puzzle and it wasn’t particularly well-liked, but a great puzzle is clever and creative, and wraps up nicely in the end!
What was your reaction when you realized how globally popular your event had become?
My friend and future inteGIRLS DC Executive Director Julie Steele and I would check on the Google Form responses from our registrations every few minutes. We’d announce every major milestone in our group chat. I remember in the first two weeks registrations were slow, and we had a goal to have 40 registered teams. We barely made it. But in the following month, things sped up. I remember we had around 800 participants a week before the event began, and I sat in bed with my fingers crossed, hoping to break 1000. And somehow the girls of the world were so enthusiastic to sign up for our event that in the last week, we started having over 100 registrations a day. We broke 1000 just two days after, and then 1500 by the start of the event. My team and I look back on the days we spent pining for 40 teams or to hit that 100 participant mark, and think to ourselves: 100 is still a good amount considering the constraints of our demographic. We’d never expected over a thousand teen girls, from so many countries around the world, to sign up.
The popularity of our event only made running it more fun! Along with my team, I’d pull all-nighters answering urgent questions and providing hints for girls from Singapore and New Zealand, and we’d watch underdog teams soar up the ranks. Best of all, we watched our participants bond — forming a global community of over 1000! And there are few feelings more rewarding than that.
Will there be a 2021 Puzzle Hunt?
Right now, our team is taking a hiatus where instead of writing puzzles, we get together online and participate in other puzzle hunts! We’re actually hoping to host another hunt as early as September of this fall! Whether the puzzle hunt continues far into the future will still depend on the schedule of our puzzle writing team (many just graduated from high school and are headed for college!) and also, of course, if the girls keep wanting more puzzles!
[Editor's Note: The Society for Science and the Public recently awarded inteGIRLS a grant to help fund next year's puzzle hunt. Congrats!]
If so, do you know what the theme will be?
Not sure yet! Maybe we’ll get tips from our past participants!
Do you know yet if it will be online, given the success of the 2020 Puzzle Hunt?
It will definitely be online, and we might even get a new system to support the massive flow of participants while having an easier way to submit answers and track progress for teams.
Does your affinity for puzzle creation and solving cross over into other aspects of your life such as gaming or riddles or other activities?
I LOVE trivia games and trivia-based podcasts. I think a lot of puzzling also has to do with knowledge — creativity in puzzles often stems from experience and variety of ideas! In terms of gaming, I’ve seen a few game references: Contagion and Monopoly in our own puzzle hunt and many others. The strategy and creativity poured into both board games and video games blends well with puzzles, and definitely makes them more interesting.
What is your ideal career path?
I can’t say exactly what I plan on doing yet as I still have a lot of room to learn and grow, but I hope I find something that engulfs my mind and heart, while still being able to help others.
Who (modern day or historical) inspires you?
My grandmas! On both my mother’s and father’s sides. On my mother’s side, my grandma was the first female head electrical engineer at her company, and one of the only women at her job in general. Considering that the 70s and 80s weren’t the most progressive of eras for women in STEM, she is a pioneer and inspiration for me. My grandma from my father’s side never officially attended school and has spent the majority of her life as a farmer in central China. Even though she has aged, she’s still the most hardworking person I know and has been through so much in her life. The women in our village — many of whom are not given the chance to attend school — remind me that there is still so much work that needs to be done to achieve gender equality in this world.
We would normally ask ‘what are some of your hobbies you enjoy in your free time,’ but since these are not normal times, we now want to ask: How do you relax/practice self-care/connect with friends during quarantine/social distancing?
I’ve recently started a crocheting habit! It’s really great and helps me take my mind completely off of everything. Other than that, the inteGIRLS team of puzzle writers and leadership has also recently started participating together in other online puzzle hunts!
Do you have any favorite fictional STEM/puzzle-solver characters in books/movies/other art forms?
Not necessarily STEM-related — but I really enjoy detective shows!
If you were a superhero, what would your go-to wearable tech device be?
I wish I had a more clever answer to this question, but I have to say telekinetic (and comfortable) contacts. First, glasses are a huge hassle for me, but I still have issues with putting contacts into my eyes, so comfortable contacts would help a lot. And telekinetic because of Matilda — besides pranking my tyrant principal, I’d also be able to free my hands and multitask much more easily.
Where can people find you and inteGirls online?
Web: www.integirls.org
Twitter: www.twitter.com/integirls
YoutTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCvOeWCu_IgKhVvSMvBD0iqg
Forum: forum.integirls.org
Instagram: www.instagram.com/inte.girls
One more thing! Think you're up to the puzzle challenge? See if you can solve the 2020 inteGIRLS questions which you can find here.