Photo by Jordan Hays.
Coding for girls
John Johnstone helps the Girls Who Code participants during club meetings.
Katy Snoddy found something that surprised her in The Wall Street Journal last fall.
She read about Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit organization that seeks to close the gender gap in the computer science field. Through educating girls, the organization plans to help fill half of the 1.4 million computer specialist positions that the U.S. Department of Labor predicts will be open by 2020 with women, according to the Girls Who Code website.
“Tim Cook [CEO of Apple] has said Alabama is so behind technology wise and coding wise,” Katy said. “We don’t have a lot of coding here. So my mom told me, ‘If you think you can do something with coding, then find somebody and contact them.’”
In December, Katy reached out to John Johnstone, associate professor of computer and information sciences at UAB, about founding a club where Johnstone could teach coding.
By January, Coding for Girls was up and running at the Homewood Public Library. In April, the club was accepted into the national organization Girls Who Code and became the first Girls Who Code chapter in Alabama.
On the second and fourth Tuesday of every month from 4-6 p.m., Johnstone teaches girls to write the code that runs the software programs they use every day.
“If you look at an iPhone app, it’s written in code,” Johnstone said. “You need something to talk to the hardware because it does nothing without code. That’s the language you speak to the computer. The people writing those apps are computer scientists.”
Code, such as JavaScript or C++, is a language that requires people to be precise. It has none of the ambiguity of languages like English. As a result, Johnstone said coding forces computer scientists to clean up their ideas and develop critical thinking and problem solving skills.
“You’re giving instructions to a machine that doesn’t know how to interpret things subtly,” Johnstone said. “When you say something, you have to mean that. You have to think, ‘I want to measure volume.’ How would I turn that into a series of steps that is precise and expresses the thought, ‘What does it mean to compute volume?’ By wrestling with that, you really understand the problem.”
In a conference room at Homewood Public Library, the girls use a program called Khan Academy to learn JavaScript. In addition to the room, the library provides laptops and a smart board for the girls to use.
“We’re trying to give them an environment where they don’t feel intimidated,” said Judith Wright, teen librarian for Homewood Public Library. “That’s part of the program they started with Girls Who Code. They want to provide an empowering environment.”
Katy didn’t know any code before the club started. Now, she’s learning how to write JavaScript and is considering attending Emory University, Wake Forest College or Georgia Tech after she graduates from John Carroll Catholic High School.