It’s a wrap on another amazing year of the Girls Code Club! Stay tuned for information about how your can get involved in the next school year! Thanks to our amazing instructor Emmali W. for her leadership and dedication to our coders!
Senior Project Manager | Strategic Planning, Cross-Functional Leadership, FTC Compliance, Project Management & Execution, Process Streamlining, Stakeholder Collaboration, Relationship Management, ERG Leadership
When I started my journey with Girls Code Club at The Lancaster Science Factory I had a couple dozen kids in 2 groups learning HTML, and I was lucky if a small handful were still with me in May. My manager was interested in what I was doing and asked “well, why not teach them actual programming basics?” Well… why not? A summer camp and 3 school years later, I have worked with 139 coders. This year, 51 coders across 4 groups learning JavaScript or Python got an invite to movie night tonight for coding with us 7 out of 9 times from September to May. Almost 90% of all the coders! There were 29 coders who earned a free coding workbook for coding with us ALL 9 sessions. At least 12 of our coders had returned for more after previous classes with me. These 8-13 year old girls continue to blow me away and challenge me not only as a coach but as an engineer. This year, I had advanced coders going as far as to try and break the exercises which not only proved understanding but creativity. Coders helped each other through problems and spent the school year gaining the confidence to say “I’ve got this!” They went off script and built games to play against each other. They learned about female role models in science, bonded with their rubber duck debugging buddies, and found out that even Miss Emma needs to ask questions sometimes. They learned about variables, arrays, functions, loops, conditionals, and algorithms. We had thoughtful discussions about internet safety, tech ethics, and DEIB. Now that the program has had a chance to expand, we’re taking it one step further to let it scale. I can’t possibly teach all of the classes until the end of time, so I am moving to a Program Lead role (still teaching!) and opening up space for some of our dedicated coaches and volunteers to step up. We are also restructuring the format to follow semesters, meeting twice a month to reduce knowledge lost between sessions and hopefully help with the fact that schedules change drastically for families in the new year. More meetings also means more languages! Exciting stuff! I couldn’t do it without our assistant coaches and volunteers, and can’t wait to see what happens next.