<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Gigaom]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[http://gigaom.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Barb Darrow]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://gigaom.com/author/gigabarb/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[How to get (and keep) girls jazzed about programming]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>Much has been written about the need to <a href="https://gigaom.com/2012/07/02/the-road-to-gender-balance-in-tech-is-paved-with-code/">involve girls in coding</a>, but the best path to success is to get them excited about using computers as tools to build what they&#8217;re interested in or solve their problems.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not about teaching any particular language &#8212; but in getting girls and young women to think computationally, said David Miller, a software engineer at [company]Google[/company]. He should know: he has three daughters and he&#8217;s taught all of them to code. He also volunteers at the Newton, Massachusetts branch of <a href="http://www.newtongwc.org/home">Girls Who Code.</a></p>
<p>He started with his first daughter Sarah, teaching her to write Candyland in Java when she was all of three years old. &#8220;Here&#8217;s the screen, here are five spaces, all red, and she took one look and said &#8216;That&#8217;s not Candyland.&#8217; She was right. There weren&#8217;t enough spaces, and they were all one color.&#8221; So lesson one is to start with something the student is familiar with and try to recreate it on-screen.</p>
<p>&#8220;You have to get them to a place where they want to know how to make the computer do what they want it to do,&#8221; said Miller, who wrote about his efforts on the <a href="http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/03/inspire-girls.html">Google Cloud Platform blog</a>.</p>
<h3 id="computer-literacy-is-not-the-g">Computer literacy is not the goal</h3>
<p>There&#8217;s a difference between computer literacy and computational thinking. The first means being able to use a word processor to write a story or a spreadsheet to create a budget. The second requires breaking a problem down into bite-sized chunks that a computer can handle and string those steps together to do useful work.</p>
<p>Novice programmers have to grasp that, at the most basic level, a computer can do four things, Miller said. It can &#8220;run steps; remember stuff; repeat things; and make decisions based on tests.&#8221; In the last case, it will perform option A if X happens or option B if Y happens.</p>
<p>He admitted that three-year-old Sarah didn&#8217;t express any particular interest in computers or programming, but she went along with dad for a while, then fell away from computing. But she came back. Now 16, she got interested in the 12-tone scale, and decided to write a program to create some music. She wrote the code, ran into a little glitch and called on her dad to help debug the program.</p>
<p>&#8220;She found a real application and picked up her skills again,&#8221; Miller said. This is the sort of &#8220;aha&#8221; moment he hopes more girls have.</p>
<p>His 13-year-old daughter, Ilana, or Lonnie, got a bit more interested in coding than her sister and Miller lauded tools like <a href="https://pencilcode.net/">Pencil Code</a>, a collaborative web site that makes it easy for new programmers to collaborate on projects. Coders can drag and drop graphical blocks of code to create a game or music, and then toggle between the blocks and the actual code. The <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/women-computing">Khan Academy</a> also has coursework that targets women in technology. (March is Women in History month.)</p>
<p>Miller also cited <a href="https://docs.python.org/2/library/turtle.html">Turtle Graphics</a> as a tool worth checking out, and for Frozen fans, <a href="http://code.org/">Code.org</a> worked with Disney to press <a href="http://www.geekwire.com/2014/let-code-disneys-frozen-teams-code-org-inspire-young-programmers/">Anna and Elsa </a>into<a href="http://www.geekwire.com/2014/let-code-disneys-frozen-teams-code-org-inspire-young-programmers/"> a programming tutorial</a> for young people</p>
<div id="attachment_919639" style="width: 814px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://gigaom.com/2015/03/08/mission-getting-and-keeping-girls-jazzed-about-programming/img_20150305_183814/" rel="attachment wp-att-919639"><img class="size-full wp-image-919639" src="https://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/img_20150305_183814.jpg?quality=80&amp;strip=all" alt="David Miller and daughter Ilana." width="804" height="851" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">David Miller and daughter Ilana.</p></div>
<p>Miller mentioned the huge gap between the girls&#8217; and boys&#8217; section of toy stores &#8212; with the boys&#8217; aisles focusing on video and war games, action stuff and the girls&#8217; area all pink and frilly and stressing creativity.</p>
<p>Computer educators should harness that call to creativity in getting girls involved in programming, he noted. If a six-year-old wants to decorate her lunchbox, why not use the computer to create the art? If she wants to create a game, ditto. The result doesn&#8217;t have to be perfect. Most kids don&#8217;t care about perfection, they care that they did the job, he said.</p>
<p>&#8220;Technology should not be a black box &#8212; something that&#8217;s not to be trusted. That takes us back to Frankenstein,&#8221; Miller said. A computer should be a tool like a pencil, something that can be used for many things.</p>
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