Originally posted by [unknown] on January 14, 2017
Growing up, I was never encouraged to learn how to build things or use lego. However, I developed into an adult with a mind always wondering how things worked and I am continuously YouTubing how to fix various broken things around my house. I wonder if this area of curiosity was encouraged by my parents, what field I may be in now. As outlined in an article written by Justina Nixon-Saintil in 2013, women only account for “20% of bachelor degrees and only 25 percent of jobs in STEM, fields.” It is also known that female students who initially were interested in STEM classes, dropped out of the sciences towards the end of high school. In an report Why so Few? the statistics of women in STEM fields are discussed, as well the possible variables that may play roles in causing the female underrepresentation in STEM. My curiosity in regards to culture and STEM is that, I wonder what apps are out there that focus on increasing the female interest in STEM, and specifically, in coding.
A quick search on the app store led me to three apps that focus on coding for girls: Goldieblocks, Nancy Drew: Codes and Clues, and a social app called Girls Who Code. I think that there is a market for coding apps for girls, and if we helped build interest in coding at a young age, it is hoped the labour market would be filled with women in STEM industries.
Originally posted by mlamey
I was going to post on coding for girls this week but then I read your post and thought this would fit better in response to your post. We also have issues with the retention of girls who are interested in taking coding. With about 10% of our coding classes being made up of females, we realize something has to be done. We need to do a better job engaging girls at a younger age than waiting for them to reach high school before being introduced to the concepts of coding. Recently it was described to me that programming is the process of programming but coding was the ability to problem solve and think critically about an issue that programming could address. A report by Google CS Ed Research Group study https://goo.gl/kHNFcH found that encouragement and exposure are key controllable indicators for whether or not young women decide to pursue a Computer Science degree with the top four influencing factors are: Social Encouragement, Self-Perception, Academic Exposure, and Career Perception. One mobile, wearable product that I was exploring was Jewelbot, developed on/for Arduino computers that, among other things, allows girls to customize the functionality of their Jewelbot through the mobile app as well to custom code using Arduino’s open source coding software. Started as a Kickstarter venture, here is a quick overview of what Jewelbots is about (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr-8tYfIzsU) and here is a longer video on how Jewlebots is being used to teach girls how to code (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4VKywFIO2Y).