Tag Archives: Computer Science

“I was right, I am the only girl. AGAIN!”

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This is the fourth summer in a row that my youngest daughter, now 13, has done some sort of a programming camp. For three out of four summers, she has been the only girl in her group. While I commend these programs for a great curriculum and instructors, this has caused me to think about how, as parents and a community, we need to step up efforts on gender balance in computing much earlier than college or even high school. If girls are not participating in programs like this in their formative years, how are to expect them to be computer science majors or pursue technical careers?

As we walked to Harvard this summer for her first day of camp, my daughter was a bit anxious about yet another digitalmediaacademy.orgsummer as the token girl. We had chosen a new program through Digital Media Academy (DMA) largely because they were one of the few to offer a Virtual Reality course where she could play with Oculus Rift and learn how to design virtual worlds. A second major factor was that much of the DMA website and materials are full of images of girls having fun with technology – suggesting they are very successful in recruiting girls to sign up for their courses.

In response to “Mom, if I am the only girl again this summer I am going to be so mad.” I tried to be encouraging and focus on the coolness of the course she was taking. I told her how leading edge she was to learn about an emerging technology before most people her age even knew what it was. I didn’t talk about the potential gender imbalance and instead focused on the fact that this was about pursuing her interests and passions. Inside though, I was hoping…no praying…she wasn’t the only one. Not just because I didn’t want her to be the one girl among the boys, but for the bigger picture. I was dying for a sign that the canaries were singing loudly in the coal mine. Hopeful that I would see a mixed group of boys and girls in the room eager to dig into technology.

The canaries weren’t singing…

When we arrived at the camp check-in area, we were relieved to see a few other girls signing in and heading off to their classrooms. The counselors whisked my daughter away to her classroom so I didn’t have a chance to see the gender composition. I asked her to text me at lunch with a pulse on how it was going.

As I walked back home, I reflected on the prior three summers. The first summer, she signed up for a game design course through ID Tech, hosted at MIT. The boys in this class were obsessed with Pokemon cards – something my daughter knew nothing about and had no interest in – and their break time was used to trade cards or play video games. As a pretty typical 10 year-old girl, she would have rather spent her lunch break talking about boy bands and Youtubers or maybe tossing a frisbee around outside. Needless to say, between that and being among a group of 8-10 year-old boys with zero interest in socializing with girls, my daughter felt pretty isolated among the group. Outside of learning a bit of Javascript, she was pretty disappointed with the experience that year.

The following year, I decided to combine a week I needed to spend at VMware’s Palo Alto HQ with an opportunity for her to try ID Tech again, but this time hosted at Stanford. She was willing to give it another try, thinking it was cool to “attend Stanford”. Once again, I dropped her off at the sign-in area and hoped for a better outcome than we experienced on the MIT campus the prior summer. At pickup time, she joyfully jumped in my rental car bubbling over about all the fun girls who were in her mobile app game design class. Just like her, some were there because their parents were in the valley for work and others were locals and long-time ID Tech participants. Not only did she have a lot more fun than the prior summer, but she accomplished a lot more in that week than I would have expected. We were both thrilled.

Flash forward to last summer and another year with ID Tech at MIT. My daughter was pretty into Minecraft at the time and was eager to go deep and get better at programming in general. She is a very go-with-the-flow kind of kid and told me she didn’t care if she was the only girl, she just wanted to geek out for a week after her return from a month at sleep-away camp. After such a good experience on the west coast the year before, I hoped that I’d see a trend shift here and she’d have other girls in her course. Alas, once again, she was the only one.

While I only have one data point of one summer in the valley, it was pretty interesting to experience such a different situation out there as compared to here. Are more households tech savvy out there because of the thick concentration of tech jobs? Is the bar higher in Silicon Valley schools such that kids out there are exposed to programming/technology earlier? Perhaps it’s climate and spending a week inside to code is a welcome break from sunshine (?!) whereas here we take every moment we can to get our kids outside before the next snomageddon.

Or, perhaps the girls here are not signing up because, like my kiddo, they’re worried they’ll be the only girl.

“I was right, I am the only girl. AGAIN!” was the text I received during her lunch break last Monday. I told her to hang in there and get as much as she could out of the course. But, I felt so very disappointed. Where are the girls that were shown so prominently on the brochure? Why are parents not signing up their girls for these cool classes? It’s Oculus for Pete’s sake!

My biggest concern here above all is that this is one of the biggest factors that impacts the pipeline of young women choosing technical degrees and jobs. If 8-13 year-old girls think their only option to learn how to code or experiment with new technology like Virtual Reality is to be an outlier in a room full of boys, they won’t sign up. Even now, while she learned a lot and got along just fine with the “gamer boys” (her nickname for them) in her class, my daughter is desperately looking into more girl-friendly programs for her age group next summer. Thankfully, now that she’s older, there are programs like Girls Who Code or Technovation. Even though I am a huge fan of programs like these and they give girls the critical mass of peer support they need, I worry it swings the pendulum the other way. I want to see balance in these programs. Not programs for just girls or those that cater to just boys.

So, how do we solve this problem?  Some suggestions:

  • Parents: Sign up your girls for programming summer camps! In most cases it’s ONE week. One! Your kids will survive a week of being indoors most of a day, trust me. And if not in the summer, sign them up during the school year or during school vacations (gasp!). Also, have them sign up with a friend to further balance whatever program they choose. And if you have boys interested in tech, try to sign them up for programs that are diverse too! The younger boys are sitting next to girls who are coding, the more “normal” it’ll feel to them as the grow up with technology.
  • Tech Camps: Don’t just try to recruit girls, sign them up. Reach out to faculty and school technology programs that have girls enrolled and develop partnerships that drive these girls to your camps. Also, try to mix up your courses so it’s not eight solid hours a day of programming. Stop catering to the boys who play video games all day and offer time to run outside or maybe even swim in the afternoon. Kids learn fast. There’s a lot they can learn in a week without having to sit in front of their desktop the whole time. And please, for the love of God, stop plastering your brochures and websites with just pictures of girls. Show boys and girls working and having fun together. Foster diversity.
  • Groups that target professional technical women: Invite young girls to some of your events or encourage mentoring between your members and the girls’ programs mentioned above. If more young girls interested in tech have role models, they are more likely to persevere in rooms full of boys. Maybe even start a camp of your own?

As the VR camp came to a close, I attended a showcase to see what my daughter had accomplished for the week. It was pretty cool to navigate the funky landscapes and terrains she had designed as though I DMA_showcasewas in them via the Rift. She was proud of what she had learned and was eager to download Unity at home so she could keep working on her project. I asked her how she felt about the week overall and she said “It wasn’t so bad this year being the only girl, in fact the best part was that I had the bathroom all to myself.”

Got ideas about how to get more young girls into tech?  Please share in the comments!

Computer Science – Because It’s Just Plain Fun

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I’ve worked in tech for my entire career and I love it. I get to work with people who are really smart (and very cool) and I get to build things that people actually use. Where did my interest come from? It all began in an office a long time ago…

I got turned on to technology in the 70’s when my Dad would take me into work with him on the weekends and give me girl-techprojects to do on his fancy Radio Shack TRS 80’s. He’d go through these huge stacks of Byte magazines and hand me cool programs he wanted to use for his civil engineering work. I’d sit in front of the “trash 80’s,” pop one of those huge 5+ inch floppy discs into the computer and start to code. The instructions were simple: Enter the text on a particular page and type “run.”  If there was an error, it was up to me to debug until the program ran successfully.

At eight years old, I had no idea that I was coding or that what I was doing was a rare activity for a girl. I liked how it felt to click on the keys. Debugging was like solving a puzzle and it was so satisfying when I finally got program to run. I was learning a new language and soon I could translate what the code was telling the computer to do. I was hooked.

As a studio art major in undergrad, I took computer graphics and Computer Aided Design (CAD) as electives. I can remember spending hours in the computer lab with my fellow students as we hacked away in BASIC to make little stick figures jump across the screen. We would fantasize about how cool it would be to get a job where this was actually what you got to do all day (If we had only known that Pixar was brewing out West!). Before the days of simple LANs and mainstream internet, I would work late into the evening with my male colleagues writing code in the lab. But not once did it ever occur to me that as a woman, I was a minority. All I knew was that I was alongside people who were as passionate as I was about what we were doing. That was all that mattered. And it still is.

Working with people who are passionate has been a fundamental driver for my career.  It concerns me that there are not enough women taking an interest in this field. Lenore Blum’s research at Carnegie Mellon demonstrates that women are more inclined to stay within the field if there are female professors and student role models to learn from and emulate. While I agree that we need more women role models in the field, and I will always try to be one myself, I also believe that if we inspire our children early to be creative thinkers who are comfortable with, and have access to, technology (beyond their smart phones and iPads), they will pursue careers in the field because it’s just plain fun.

We need to show children (and their parents) that computer science is an interesting and cool career path and not just an option for nerdy boys. We need to integrate lessons on programming, networks and clouds into daily curricula because these are basic tools one should possess. Children learning about how our bodies work, science works, or how to do math equations should be equally educated in the history and workings of the technology they use and rely upon every day. This is how we can diffuse the “nerdy boy” stigma associated with computer science. This is how we can better prepare our children to be innovators of the future.

I have three daughters who are all tech savvy. It’s unclear which side of the nature vs. nurture debate that falls under but regardless, technology has been a part of their lives since they were born. They see it as an enabler for a variety of fields and not just the basis to become programmers. With two who are artists and one who is a musician/budding architect, their days are filled with high tech sound mixing, computer graphics and CAD tools. It is a part of their daily lives. They are well past making a stick figure jump across the screen and blow me away with what they can do with the technology at their fingertips.

As we kick off CS Ed Week in MA this week (December 8-14), hundreds of young people and their parents will be checking out Hour of Code at their schools or with local community groups. The purpose is to provide access to coding and demonstrate how fun it can be. My hope is that somewhere a young boy or girl will be as excited about technology after that hour as I was when I was in my dad’s office years ago, and still am today.

To find a group in your area that is leading an Hour of Code, check out this list. You can also help promote computer science in your community by signing this pledge to encourage policy makers to include computer science in core curricula.

Please tweet or post your experiences during CS Ed Week using the #HourOfCode and include @Masstlcef if you’re in MA!

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The Value of An Art Degree (and Computer Science)

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Recently, one of of my friends sought my advice about her son’s college plans. artscienceShe and her husband had aspirations for him to apply to computer science programs and he had just announced that he wanted to apply to art schools. GASP!

“What’s he going to do with an art degree? How will he make any money?”

As the resident nerd among my gaggle of friends, I wasn’t surprised to be asked about how to sway her son towards computer science. However, my friend didn’t realize how close this was to my own experience when it came time for me to apply to college many years ago.

I was born an artist. I would have finger painted my way from preschool through Kindergarten if I hadn’t been forced to learn my ABCs and 123s. I doodled on every notebook and book cover I made (you know, the ones you made with paper bags?) and while my friends were playing soccer or going to cheerleading practice, I was taking painting and pottery classes.

Despite my artistry being a defining characteristic throughout my young life, when it came time for college, my engineer Dad put a halt to my dreams of a career in art. He wanted me to be self-sufficient with a practical degree that gave me plenty of career options. Being a starving artist was out of the question. While I wasn’t happy about this, I wasn’t paying the bills for college, so I enrolled in the liberal arts program at UMASS Amherst.

Three years and four different declared majors later, once I had satisfied every general education requirement and took a few business classes, I applied and was accepted into my university’s studio art program.

I went on to graduate school to earn an MS in Management Information Systems, but my undergraduate degree in studio art impacted my career like no other major or on the job training could have done. I developed skills that were invaluable for my eventual career in technology. Here are just a few:

Learning by doing: Instead of rote memorization for exams, I was given complex assignments that were left totally up to my interpretation with extremely tight deadlines. Each assignment involved deep thought for a tangible outcome and there was no right answer; it was the quality of my execution and ability to convince the professor and my peers that I achieved a good result. This experience prepared me for projects where rapid prototyping and user experience were vital to success and led to my ability to delivery high quality software products on short timelines.

Presentation Skills: Standing up in front of your peers to “defend” your approach to an art assignment is not easy. It’s not a power point outlining the impact of the Vietnam War. It’s a very personal explanation of why your piece makes sense and why you feel you achieved the goal of the assignment. At 20 years old, presenting in front of a group to speak was terrifying for me, but after two years of art school, I learned how to be a confident speaker who could translate the complex ideas in my head into easy to understand concepts for almost any audience.

Creative Problem Solving: Each art assignment challenged me to create something unique. More importantly, it was a piece that not only I thought was beautiful and met the requirements, but something others would understand. I learned to take a novel idea, distill it into a “development” plan, and make something that others could appreciate. I attribute my ability to work with teams on highly complex and innovative technology products to this experience.

There is much research and many articles written about how art and science come together – this is what the STEAM (Science, Technology Engineering, ART and Math) movement is about. I am certain that, as an artist, my entry into the world of technology was no accident. I have worked with countless engineers throughout my career who are also artists and the common theme among them is the way they creatively solve problems and present their innovative ideas. I think the Dean of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where my oldest daughter just enrolled as a film major, said it amazingly well this past weekend at Parents’ Day:

“Artists have the broadest set of skills. They have strengths in creative thinking, communication and leadership like no other student. They are willing to take risks and challenge convention and the world needs more artists for the next moonshot.”

So, what did I tell my friend? I told her to let her son apply to art school! If he’s got an interest in science and/or math, those will come later. For now, let him develop valuable skills that will pay off down the road no matter what path he chooses

Are you an artist in a technical role or have kids following similar paths?  Please share your stories in the comments!

People Who Code – A Call to Action

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I am a huge advocate of the women in computer science movement. coding-bannerI am also a huge fan of the Computer Science (CS) field in general and, despite my number of years in this industry, I continue to be amazed at the volume and speed by which new technology is coming at us. Yet, with all that’s going on out there, it is still incredibly hard to find talented developers and designers. So, while I want to see more young girls learning to code and women in professional technical roles, quite frankly I just want to see more people who code.

Three things happened recently that made me realize that I need to focus my efforts on encouraging more young people to get into computer science:

First, there was the scuttlebutt around the “Male Allies” panel at the Grace Hopper Conference a couple of weeks ago. Everyone was so wound up about the gaffes of the three men on the panel that we lost sight of their key messages which were to support gender balance and eliminate wage gaps in tech across all levels of a company. How are we going to make progress for women and minorities in tech if we attack the majority when they aim to support the movement? When will meritocracy prevail over gender? My friend Jocelyn Goldfein has a lot of good thoughts on this topic here. We need to bring men into this conversation without them worrying about being attacked for speaking up and we need to focus on how to build great careers in CS for everyone – not just women.

Second, I have been thinking a lot lately about the preponderance of women and girls’ organizations that are encouraging and supporting women to code and choose technical careers. It’s wonderful that there are SO many of these organizations out schools-codingthere, yet it is so hard for girls and women to know which ones are the best to meet their particular needs and/or interests. I am concerned by how many of them position themselves competitively against each other vs. combining forces to form a stronger, united, movement. A founder of one of these organizations told me recently that when she approached a nearby, similar, group to collaborate she was met with “hostile resistance”. Also, that some of the members of her organization did not want to be part of meta-organizations because it drew too much “adverse attention” to their roles – akin to the extreme circumstances of #gamergate where women are fearful for their lives because of their chosen profession. Certainly there are varying views on how best to encourage girls and women to code, but imagine how powerful these groups would be if they combined efforts instead of competing with each other or fearing retribution (or worse) for participating. Perhaps the mere size of these groups would deter those who attack them today or maybe, even, convince their attackers to support vs. challenge their mission.

Finally, I was recently enlightened by my friends at the MassTLC Education Foundation on the rather pathetic state of our k-12 CS programs in Massachusetts. I view CS as basic literacy in the 21st century, yet in most publicmassCS_stats and private schools it is treated like an elective, not a core math or science requirement. In 2012, only 1000 students in Massachusetts took AP CS and 559 passed; of those who passed, only 24 were underrepresented minorities and 89 were female. There are also no standards or licensure for teachers who teach CS in k-12. According to this NPR story, only an estimated 10% of k-12 schools in our country teach computer science. This interactive data chart shows the steady decline of CS majors in the US. With all the money out there to invest in new technology and innovation, we are not making the same level of investment in the people we need to make these innovations a reality and sustainable into the future.

From the past we have learned that big issues such as the civil rights and feminist movements took large groups of likeminded people to go from controversy to significant policy and cultural changes. We take for granted that women can vote in the US and in many, but not all, other countries around the world and we tend to forget that not too many years ago, schools and busses were segregated. Today, we are fighting for equal pay and career opportunities for women and there is controversy about how few women there are studying CS, but there is a bigger issue to solve. If Venture Capitalists and technology industry leaders want to support these movements, we need to do more than just attend conferences and speak on panels. We need to change policy – like eliminating noncompetes in MA to allow talent to move where their passions take them instead of feeling trapped in their jobs or eager to depart from the field of technology altogether.  We need to band together instead of standing on hundreds of different platforms to solve a greater issue. We need to fund programs for young people – not just girls – that foster interest in creativity and technology. We need to enlighten high school kids about the opportunities in technology and be available to mentor these kids when they go to college. We need people who code.

Do you agree that we need to do more to encourage young people to code? Join me the week of December 8-14 for CS Ed Week where the MassTLC Education Foundation will be championing Hour of Code in cities and schools across all of Massachusetts. This national program is designed to inspire students to learn more, dream more and be more through Computer Science.