Polly Smith, a senior curriculum developer at Code Ninjas, a franchise of international coding instruction centers, reflects on her own experiences. She had little interest in computer science when she was a student leading up to her career teaching third and fifth grade. With a slight nudge from her peers, Smith attended a boot camp on coding, enjoying it so much that she decided to establish an after-school program to share what she learned with the students.
“All of my students enjoyed it,” she recalled, “not just the boys.”
But after that, Smith witnessed what fellow educators had been talking about for years: Girls’ interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) often plummets during middle school, at a time when young people can become increasingly self-conscious and struggle to find their sense of belonging.
“They need that sense of belonging in the space where they are learning,” Smith said. “If there’s even just one person who has a similarity with them, it increases their stay rate.”
To promote staying power in STEM as part of Women’s History Month and Expanding Girls’ Horizons in Science and Engineering Month, Code Ninjas has partnered with the nonprofit Girls Who Code program and Microsoft MakeCode to offer free entry to its Female Game Changers Game Jam event for females aged 5 and up. Through April 1, participants are invited to design a video game using Microsoft’s free MakeCode Arcade online tool. Students 15 and older are eligible for prizes.
Each submitted game should include a female adult character who changed your life, whether a teacher, mentor, coach, relative or friend, Smith explained. Beyond that, it’s up to the designer to choose the game type (first person, third person, sports), establish the premise and challenges, and color their digital worlds as they see fit.
“As you’re making the game, you are kind of accidentally learning,” Smith said, adding that using concepts such as gravity and velocity in developing the game is like a lesson in physics.
The nonprofit Girls Who Code offers more than 6,300 educational programs worldwide, including summer immersion programs, after-school clubs and college organizations, according to its website. Code Ninja, a site-based learning business, serves 33,000 children across 400 locations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, Smith said. Collectively, these programs and any number of independent coding clubs or free online educational coding tools are motivating girls and young women to explore STEM and reinforce the educational value of computational skills.
Smith calls coding “an essential literacy of the 21st century.”
“Computational thinking, problem-solving and a debugging mindset — making a mistake and learning from that mistake — these are beneficial to all subject areas,” she said. “They [students] will have the ability to step back and see the bigger picture. We all know coding as a career will look very different in the future to the generation we are serving.”
