Coding is cool at the moment, but it hasn’t always been that way—especially among girls.
At the all-girls school where I teach
in Johannesburg, South Africa, the
students generally thought of computer
programming as antisocial, nerdy, and
not that relevant to solving real-world
problems. As an information technology (IT) teacher who has seen firsthand
the benefits my students have gleaned
from learning programming, however,
I felt they were missing out. And I had a
few tricks up my sleeve for getting them
to see just how cool coding can be.
The Case for Computing
I started teaching at Roedean, a private school for girls with a reputation
for academic excellence, in 2008.
Although not formally trained as a
programmer, I have been leading
computer classes since the mid-1990s.
I like to teach all of my students—not
just those taking IT—some JavaScript
and HTML, because I believe everyone should have some coding background to round out their digital skills
and develop critical thinking.
I immediately found that Roedean
was magnificently resourced, with
Adobe CS3—complete with Pho-
toshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash—
loaded on every machine in the com-
puter rooms. The school had always
achieved excellent results in IT on the
final examinations, but very few girls
contributed to those scores, as class
sizes for the subject rarely surpassed
three students. This is entirely in keep-
ing with international trends that show
far fewer women than men majoring
in computer studies at the university
level. My IT department, however,
saw this as all the more reason to do
our best to get our girls interested.
Unfortunately, despite its top-of-
the-line equipment and software, I
found the computer skills syllabus
to be somewhat limited. There was
a cabinet filled with ready-made les-
sons about spreadsheets and word
processing, but no teaching about
databases, no creative packages, and
no programming! The girls who took
computing learned Java, but none of
the other girls received any coding
experience at all. I definitely had my
work cut out for me.
Today, we teach computer literacy
in grades 8, 9, and 10. IT classes are
based on Java programming, and we
also cover some Scratch and JavaScript. In computer skills, we try to
ensure that all our girls have a foundation in Office applications, the Adobe
Creative Suite, information literacy,
and research skills. Of course, making
the programmatic changes was the
easy part. Getting the girls to take an
interest in computing proved to be a
whole different challenge.
Let the Student Become the Master
I cut my teeth on Seymour Papert’s
ideas about constructionism—the
theory that learning can happen most
effectively when people are making
tangible objects in the real world—
and discovery learning, or giving
children a tool and then standing back
to let them explore it. That’s why it
seemed to me criminal that girls who
had such excellent resources at their
disposal were not being encouraged
to explore and use them, presumably
because the teachers did not know
how to use the tools themselves.
I had some exposure to Photoshop
and Dreamweaver, but I had never
used Flash before. Rather than let this
stop me, however, I decided to use my
inexperience to my advantage.
“I’m not good at Photoshop,” I
told them. “But just look up tutori-
als on the internet and play with it,
and you’ll be able to do much more
than I can!” And they did—probably
with more enthusiasm for the subject
than they would muster for hours and
hours of direct instruction.
In my experience, the discovery
method does not really work without
extensive scaffolding. It’s the “scholar’s
dilemma,” the idea that you can’t
learn something if you don’t know it’s
there. To work, this technique requires
a teacher to tell the students what’s
there—to set a foundation by teaching what they know—and then challenge them to go beyond the teacher’s
knowledge and learn for themselves.
Most do surpass their teacher’s competency and achieve some wonderful
results. And the ones who can’t, will at
least learn what the teacher knows and
have the security of following in some
pretty worn footsteps.
Of course, because I have continued
to learn throughout my career too, I
often have to appear less competent
than I am for this method to work.
The temptation is always to just give
the students the answer or show them
how it works. But I have found that it
is far more valuable to give them tools
for figuring it out for themselves and
encourage them to teach each other
through mentor groups in class.
GET THEM INTERESTED
