I am doing an hour of code with my after school coding class this Thursday. In addition, I have worked with Mrs. Williams’ class to do an hour of coding today in the labs. Ms. Donnelly has also done an hour of code herself and is planning on having her students spend time coding as well.

We have been using this tutorial http://learn.code.org/hoc/1 as most people are familiar with Angry Birds. Using Blocky, students learn how to write Javascript through a object oriented interface. After watching the introduction video, I asked the class of sixth graders what they saw in the video. The responses were about how to use the program and all of the men they saw in the video. They listed off Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Drew Houston with no trouble. No one in the class mentioned Elena of Clothia, Janete, the Zynga Engineer, Paola, the Microsoft Engineer, or Tanya, the Computer Science student who introduced the lesson. This identifies why we not only need to teach programming but also why we need to teach girls how to program. In addition to teaching programming to more students, we need to support girls to take on the challenges of computer science when their efforts can be invisible in a world so often considered a male dominated profession.

Our motto should be: Consume less, Code more!