Where did all the geek girls go?
Contributed by
Jeffrey Elkner, July 22, 2009
There are significantly more girls in our Scratch summer enrichment classes then their are in any of our regular computer programming classes. Is Scratch doing something right?
See my blog post here.
I agree with Karen about experimenting with the course names. As a geek girl who wasn't exposed to programming until after college, I really think that the "creative" keyword could be a huge draw for female tweens. Love the Scratch title -- I think that something similar for Python/GASP would sound good too. "Gaming" does make me think immediately of boys (not sure why, it's just that gut reaction!).
I enjoyed reading your reflections about teaching the enrichment courses. One difference that was immediately apparent was the names of the courses: "Creative Computer Exploration with Scratch" vs. "Games Programming with Python and GASP". Have you experimented much with the naming of the course offerings?