How To Get Girls InTo Coding

When I was 7 years old, I knew the capitals of most major countries and their currencies. I had to; if I wanted to find a criminal genius twisted in the computer game "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" On the screen, the ACME Detective Agency spitting tracks as notable landmarks to help players identify the city where Carmen globetrotting henchmen were hiding. I do not know how to pronounce Reykjavik for more than a decade ago, but I realized that your currency is called the crown.



I was the son of Indian immigrants, and like any Bengal tiger cub reluctantly penciled me in maps fill in the blanks and memorized the multiplication tables after dinner. I was much more motivated to learn about geography chasing Carmen Sandiego on the Macintosh Plus family. I could not confidently point to Iceland on a map. But I became a technology journalist.

A big push nationally is underway, funded by donors Code.org nonprofit 's companies and billionaires, Amazon and Google to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, to enter the U.S. school for encoding and redefine it as a basic ability to learn alongside the three Curriculum Code.org R. 's has been adopted by 20,000 teachers of kindergarten through grade 12.

But if the encoding is the new lingua franca, literacy rates for girls are falling: Last year, girls accounted for 18.5 percent of AP Computer examined nationwide, a slight decrease from the previous year. In three states, no girls tested at all. An abysmal 0.4 percent of girls entering college intend to major in computer science. And in 2013, women accounted for 14 percent of all graduates of computer science - down from 36 percent in 1984.

The imbalance persists in the technology industry. This week, Google released data showing that women represent only 17 percent of high-tech employees. The problem is not only getting girls to computer class, but keeps them there.

Natalie Rusk is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who helped develop Scratch, a programming platform open source where kids can code games and animation projects and then share how-to tips. She believes that the next two years will determine whether the coding can begin to close the gender gap. "One of the key reasons for widening participation is to get a greater diversity of who is designing these technologies," he said. "It's being presented as" learning to program, '"she said," but no,' what do you want to program? What is your idea? "