PowerPoint Presentation

Anchorage Programming WorkshopAnchorage Maker Faire7/27/13

Who is APW?

Founded in March

To empower women (and friends) to learn programming.

Woman == female-identified

Men are welcome if they are the guest of female participants.

Anchorage Programming Workshop- founded in March- our goal is to empower women (and friends) to learn programming- any person who identifies as female and wants to learn to program is welcome; a man is also welcome IF he is the guest of a female attendee2

Why programming?

Computers are everywhere.

Programming can make our jobs (and lives) easier.

> 1.1 million new computing-related jobs by 20181

Why teach programming?- computers are everywhere, and knowing how they work is helpful to every job- many jobs can be made easier by creating programs to do boring, repetitive tasks for you- more than 1.4 million total new computing-related job openings by 2018 - US Dept of Labor3

But why else programming?

I talked about the business case for teaching people to code, but several of our workshop attendees showed up without any tech-related career goals. They just wanted to do cool things.

This is an example of a program written in Python that just makes pretty colors show up on your monitor. Its also not a ridiculously hard projectyou can go from knowing no programming at all to writing this in a day, day and a half. 4

And.

Some people want to learn to program to make games.

Im sure nobody has recreate Pong on their to-do list, but its a good example, because I built this as part of a recent Coursera course, and it only took me 3 hours or so. It was using their special graphics module, not something standard, so I cant exactly put this version of Pong on my website but Im thinking of rewriting it in something standard, so that I can.5

Why focus on women?2

US workforce is 51% female; IT is less than 25%

Software written only by men works primarily for men.

More diverse teams build better software.

software built by men will work ... for men, and we pretty much ALL need to use computers; logically, getting more women programming will make the world better- one concrete example: early voice recognition software didnt recognize female voices. An early video conferencing system used voice recognition to move the camera, to focus on the person who was talking. Great idea, right? Only, because the voice recognition software didnt hear women, the camera never moved when a woman was speaking. Women were literally invisible. (Clubhouse)

Diversity:A very large study found that 50/50 male/female teams were more creative, experimented more, communicated better, and got more done than other teams.Another study found that mixed-gender teams produce IT patents that are cited 26-42% more than homogenous teams.Other studies have shown that, if you take a team of your very best male programmers, and you pit that team against a more moderately-skilled team that is also diverse, the diverse teams are consistently higher-performing.6

We borrowed the idea

Mostly-female environment

Positive female role models.

Fixing the confidence differential.

Allowing male guests keeps the environment predominantly female, without being exclusionary.

Positive role models of women who are great programmers, who are just learning, etc. - women see themselves in the people around them

Women are less confident than men in their math and science abilities - even when achieving equally. Even when men and women receive the same grades, women feel less of a sense of achievement.

Stereotype threat. 8

Past Workshops

Introduction to GitHub

Web Fundamentals

HTML, Part 1

Open Work Session

Upcoming Workshops

GitHub this Wednesday!Sign up at our booth!

More HTML & CSS

Python & Ruby

Come tell us what you want to learn!

Find us!

We have a booth here!

anchorageprogramming.org

On Facebook: facebook.com/anchorageprogramming

Email: hosts@anchorageprogramming.org

References

1 US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statisticshttp://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/11/art5full.pdf

2 National Center for Women in Information Technology, http://www.ncwit.org/resources/women-it-facts

ColorWall Video Eric Phetteplace, https://vine.co/v/haaMzwHrwFr

Various anecdotes:

Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Margolis & Fischer

http://geekfeminism.org/

Questions?

This slide deck:

Coral Sheldon-Hess & Becky Boonehosts@anchorageprogramming.orgPositive role models of women who are great programmers, who are just learning, etc. - women see themselves in the people around them

Women are less confident than men in their math and science abilities - even when achieving equally. Even when men and women receive the same grades, women feel less of a sense of achievement.

Stereotype threat. 13