This summer, I was as a teaching assistant for the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program at Warner Bros. Technology. Reflecting on my experience in the classroom through the lens of a digital humanities student caused me to consider the impact of technology on today’s generation of students. First, I saw how important it is for students to learn about technology. Second, I learned that how students are taught about technology influences their success in the classroom and further interest in the subject. By paying attention to the specifics of what was being taught, how it was being taught, and the teaching philosophies that inspired the classroom culture, I recognized several key characteristics that contributed to the success of our classroom. I found that these characteristics were remarkably similar to characteristics of introductory coding classes taken by digital humanities students.
I realized that teaching these classes can be approached the same way, as both classes must not only teach students how to code, but also inspire them to make the decision to further pursue technology. This inspiration comes from learning to code in an environment that instills confidence, provides a supportive community, redefines computer science, is accessible to those without prior experience, emphasizes the value of hard work, organization, and resilience, encourages, encourages creativity and discovery, constantly evaluates student progress and success, and allows students to learn by doing.
While the field of technology is one of the fastest growing job markets, female representation in the field is only at 24%. This is a decrease from the 37% female representation in 1995 (Saujani 2017). This overwhelming underrepresentation in the technology career field is devastating, as women have so many unique and valuable skills, qualities, and perspectives to contribute. Computer science is a job of problem solving. Creativity, critical thinking, and teamwork are large, yet often over-looked, aspects of problem solving. Expanding the experiences, backgrounds, and point of views behind these problem-solving skills can be especially useful, as women represent half of the society that will eventually use these technical solutions to real world problems. Increasing representation of women in the technology workforce increases the diversity of in teams working on projects, ultimately creating higher quality solutions and products (Eney et al. 48).
The biggest decrease in interest in computer science occurs much before a woman selects her college major or selects her first job, making the middle and high school years the greatest contributor to this drop-off. In the male-dominated field of computer science, there is a desperate need to empower girls with the desire, confidence, and skills to break in and succeed (Saujani 2017).
While the field of technology is one of the fastest growing job markets, female representation in the field is only at 24%. This is a decrease from the 37% female representation in 1995. The biggest decrease in interest occurs much before a woman selects her college major or selects her first job, making the middle and high school years the greatest contributor to this drop-off. In the male-dominated field of computer science, there is a desperate need to empower girls with the desire, confidence, and skills to break in and succeed (Saujani 2017).
In 2012, Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code with the goal of decreasing the gender gap by changing the way young girls view computer science. Her vision is for girls to see computer scientists as more than just capable of writing code, but as problem solvers fulfilling a vision for a better world by utilizing technology. Today, Girls Who Code has grown to reach over 90,000 girls in all 50 states through its various types of programs, and its college-aged alumni are pursing higher education in computer science-related fields at a rate of fifteen times the national average (Saujani 2017).
The Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program is a seven-week program for incoming eleventh and twelfth grade girls with little or no programming experience. The program encourages girls to pursue computer science by teaching them coding skills through a project-based curriculum and demonstrating how computer science can be used to solve real-world problems. The curriculum begins with introductory concepts in coding, covers applications of computer science, including robots, web development and data science, and culminates with the girls working on a final project for the last two weeks. Throughout the course, students learn Scratch, Python, Arduino C, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Each Summer Immersion Program is hosted by a partner company, who provides the class with field trips, guest speakers, and workshops to show girls practical and relevant applications of technology and allow girls to learn from females currently in computer science fields. Classes last from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon and are taught by a teaching team consisting of one teacher and two teaching assistants. Our teaching team's goal was to teach the curriculum, manage our classroom, and encourage and mentor the students, ultimately building a supportive and collaborative learning environment.
Digital humanities is the "study, exploration, and preservation of, as well as education about, human cultures, events, languages, people, and material production in the past and present… for scholars, students, and the general public" (Sanders 2017). It creates a digital environment of study in a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach towards data analysis, studying primary sources, discussion and publishing findings and research, and teaching. It involves utilizing technology to research traditional humanities questions, and conversely asking humanities-based questions about technology and its use (Sanders 2017). It is a small, but expanding field, growing out of the motivation to better explain the human experience through the production of tangible and accessible scholarship (Locke 2017). Digital humanities studies reveal how data constructs a "provisional, relative, and profoundly ideological" representation of our world, and understanding how to use technology as a tool to study it (Posner 2016).
Besides the growth of the field of computer science itself, programming is becoming an increasingly desirable skill as it is infiltrating other fields as well. The new technology-related jobs that are rapidly appearing are both jobs that are built around technology and jobs have begun to integrate and even rely on technology, requiring someone with developed technical skills. Therefore, there is a growing significance of having a background in technology fields, even in fields not traditionally thought of as part of the technology field. This generation of students is going to see so many revolutionary ways of incorporating technology into their careers, and many of these jobs haven’t even been invented yet. They are the generation of students who will be pioneering new careers by recognizing and stepping in to fill needs or inventing new ways of integrating technology with their passions. This future of technology further increases the threat of the underrepresentation of females in this discipline. Developing coding skills is no longer only crucial for those who specifically choose to specifically enter the computer science field. It is also becoming a highly desirable skill in many other fields, making it increasingly critical that programming skills become more accessible. This includes making them available to students from all educational, social, and economic backgrounds, with specific consideration for underrepresented groups such as females and minority groups (Cooper & Dierker 93).
In general, both high school girls and undergraduate digital humanities students have no or very little coding experience. While computer science students taking their first coding class are planning on taking multiple more coding classes, high school girls and digital humanities students generally view this introductory course as a opportunity to try out something new and see if it is something they wish to pursue further. Therefore, an introductory course created for such students must not only teach fundamental coding skills, but also inspire students to want to keep learning. To prevent disengagement from the material by students who have had no formal background in programming, the success of these classes requires the awareness and patience of the teacher to explain new concepts in multiple ways and develop lessons and a classroom culture that instill confidence in the students (Muller & Kidd 190). The goal of these courses is to create an "advanced beginner" programmer who can see how further developing their skills can allow them to create projects and solutions they are passionate about (Muller & Kidd 177). An "advanced beginner" student has become comfortable enough with what they have learned and understand how they learned it. As a result, they have developed the basic problem solving skills, they understand how to apply this knowledge to novel situations, and they have gained the ability to know how to keep learning (Muller & Kidd 181). By constructing courses by merging computer science and the consideration of the context of the students, introductory courses can develop coding skills and prove the relevancy of computer science to the students' interests (Muller & Kidd 177). Additionally, this interdisciplinary approach of using computer science to address real-world applications can improve the access of programming to students underrepresented in computer science (Cooper & Dierker 93).