Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& Lucy Sanders: & Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of NCWIT, The National Center for Women and Information Technology. This is another in a series of interviews that we're having with wonderful women entrepreneurs, people who have started innovative companies, doing great things. All the way from cars, to web services, to education, and lots of interesting entrepreneurs in this interview series. With me Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: & Hi, I'm so happy to be here. This sounds like it's going to be a real interesting interview. Of course it'll be in a few different places, including on w3w3.com, where you can listen to it anytime you want. Lucy: & That's awesome. Well today, we are interviewing an entrepreneur in the quote "gamification space." The combination of education and the gaming fields, and also, I'm very proud to say a NCWIT member company in our entrepreneurial alliance. Moira Hardek is the president and CEO of Galvanize Labs. Galvanize Labs is a hybrid education and gaming company focused on teaching critical technology skills. They have produced a number of educational video games and most recently, a game called "Taken Charge." That's a merge of players and very captivating learning stories while teaching them some of the fundamental building blocks of a quality technology education. Before that, Moira spent a number of years at Best Buy where she created and piloted a program I think many of our listeners will know well as part of the Geek Squad Summer Academy. This was a really great hands‑on technology education camp. It's still going on today. Very successful, and had a particular emphasis on young women. Before we start with the interview questions, Moira, why don't you give us a little bit about the latest at Galvanize Labs? This is a relatively recent startup, correct? Moira Hardek: & Yes, we're just a little bit over a year old, and our big launch right now is Taken Charge. Taken Charge is all about teaching about the building blocks of technology education. To be able to get into things like coding and game design and more advanced technology topics, we are teaching the building blocks of technology to get more kids prepared to get into more advanced topics of tech education, and we're really excited about it. Lucy: & This is a follow‑up question to that. You're in this hot space of computing education in the K‑12, K‑16 spaces. What are you seeing out there that's going on? Is there a shift, do you think, in the general public's interest of this area? Moira: & I think so, definitely. Technology is everywhere. It's not just an industry and a field to work in, although it's a very, very exciting place to work in. Technology is part of any type of career that you want to be part of. We used to ask that of all of our students when we were taking other types of programs. We've challenged kids. They would say, "I don't know if I really need to have Tech Ed, because I don't know if I want to be a programmer, and I don't know if I want to be a game designer." We challenge them, we said, "Can you name a career or name a job where you're not going to interact with technology?" You can't anymore, so this is important across any type of career that you're going to have. We think this is just a key building block for anything you're going to do today. Lucy: & We agree. We think too, at NCWIT, that we're seeing a key change here and it's good. It's about time. Galvanize Labs is going to play a huge role in that. Moira, why don't you tell our listeners how you first got interested in technology? You had a technology career at Best Buy, and Geek Squad Academy, and now at Galvanize. Tell us a bit about how you got there. Moira: & First, it's that interest in technology, I think probably the way that you get interested in anything. It was just p