Traditionally the video game industry has been seen as a “boys club;” however, this is changing. With almost half of gamers being female and the number of female game programmers doubling since 2009, the fight for gender equality in the video game industry is gathering force. This movement begins with our students.
This is a re-blog post originally posted by Sarah Avery and published with kind permission.
The original post can be found here.
There are many opportunities out of the classroom for girls to become involved in gaming, including Girls Who Code, iD Tech, Girls Make Games, and more. At these programs, female students bond with their peers over their love of gaming and coding without fear of judgement.
Fort Cherry School District uses the Hummingbird technology from Birdbrain, a Pittsburgh based technology education company, to get students interested in programming and coding through their after school Fashion Bots program. Even at the elementary level, Fort Cherry is actively engaging girls in the building and crafting aspect of the technology. The Hummingbird Technology, based on Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, is a robotics kit designed to enable engineering and robotics activities that involve the making of robots, kinetic sculptures, and animatronics built out of a combination of kit parts and crafting materials. As hands-on projects, students design, build and program robots. Fort Cherry has found that the crafting and design aspect of the Hummingbirds immediately draws in girls who then learn to love coding.
Along with classroom and camp opportunities, there are many scholarships available for female students with coding skills. Check out the video below for the Kode with Karlie Scholarship.
Karlie Kloss, fashion model and ballerina encourages girls to join her at the Flatiron School for a summer coding session.
Karlie Kloss, after building a career modelling, discovered her love of coding. With her passion, she has offered a scholarship to young middle and high school women to help them realize their dreams using coding. To apply for her scholarships, students were required to make a youtube video explaining why coding is important to them and how they would use their new knowledge. Three of these applications can be seen below.
“We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
– Marie Curie
How have you encouraged your students to work with coding?
You need to Login or Register to bookmark/favorite this content.
Be the first to comment