Equity in CS: Empowered to take action

A few years ago, Google came out with a paper entitled, "Women Who Choose Computer Science - What Really Matters." The link to the entire paper is available here.  It's an incredible paper in many ways, but the big takeaway for me was that we are in a position to do something to close the gender gap in education right now. To me, this was incredibly empowering - to realize that there are factors substantiated by research that make a tremendous difference in a girl's life in terms of choosing CS as a degree major. According to the paper, it all comes down to encouragement and exposure. Specifically, this paper found four key influencing factors: social encouragement, self perception, academic exposure, and career perception. Even more amazing was that this research found that uncontrollable factors such as parental occupation play a limited role in women choosing a CS degree.

Armed with this understanding of the impact that exposure and encouragement can have, I started a Girls Who Code club at the middle school I was teaching at. Through this experience, I came to see that Girls Who Code was as much about building community as it was about inspiring the students about computer science. The girls even got to speak at a national STEM conference and sponsor a schoolwide CS event with student council. Fast forward to 2016 and come to find out that research with Accenture and Girls Who Code has found that middle school is a critical time to spark young girls' interest in computer science, coming back again to the all-important role that encouragement and exposure play. This research then goes on to share ways to continue to sustain that engagement in CS through the high school years and on into college where they are inspired toward a career in computing. The link to the article is here.

Going beyond what was happening just at my school, my district became part of the K-12 Alliance with NCWIT.  Inspired through this partnership, my district has started an initiative called PVWIT in order to address the issues of equity and access in the field of computer science. It's been amazing to see this effort grow, expand and reach students all over. Just last weekend, PVWIT hosted its first Code-a-thon. The way I like to think of it is that the only thing better than creating and coding on your own is to create and code with a community...and that's just what Code-a-thons are all about. I knew that I wanted to gear it toward K-5 students and have middle school students there to help out as well. I invited 14 teachers and the district IT team to host tables: Scratch, robotics, Raspberry Pis, and more. We marketed through social media and teachers sent home bookmarks, paper reminder bracelets and stickers in agendas. I created passports for the day of the Code-a-thon so coders could go around to all the stations we had.

Code-a-thon bookmarks, passports and stickers

I also wanted mentoring to be a part of the whole experience, so I reached out to local industry volunteers with a Women in IT volunteer initiative (in my case, this was American Express). I also reached out to my local university's Women in Computing club with whom I had connected before on class projects and they were also happy to send 5 volunteers. It was great to see industry work alongside university alongside middle school and elementary students - mentoring and community is what it is all about. Or, coming back to the research - we are here finding ways to encourage and expose students to CS as a way to work toward equity in CS.

Code-a-thon 2016

Industry, college and district volunteers