As part of a passionate and diverse team of graduate student volunteers who use coding in their work, I’ve been involved in teaching basic programming skills to middle- and high-school aged girls. Women often make up a small proportion of workers in technical fields, especially computer science. Having benefitted from coding skills in our own work, me and the teaching team seek to inspire curiosity, confidence, and passion for programming in girls who are just starting to think about their careers.
Starting from no programming knowledge, we introduce the students to the fundamentals of programming using Trinket, a free-to-use online-hosted Python and Blockly editor. Over the course of 6 free weekly workshops, our students learn everything from variable creation to while loops, and practice their skills by creating their own interactive game.
Since 2017, I’ve been involved in organizing, writing lessons for, and teaching these workshops. Check out the website here for more information/inspiration, or check out our ever-developing lesson plan if you’d like to run something similar!
Inspired by the impacts of the Girls’ Coding Club, I also developed a full-day coding workshop in collaboration with the UBC Learning Exchange - a community-focused learning centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. To engage Downtown Eastside residents with programming in an interactive and hands-on way, I developed a workshop based on MIT’s App Inventor, a simple block-based development environment that creates Android apps.
Because many Downtown Eastside residents do not have reliable access to a computer or internet, we taught them how to create mobile apps they could carry home with them. This workshop was taught in December 2018 to students aged 30-75, and taught the basics of programming logic in a Blocks programming environment.