She Can Code Challenge
She Can Code is an initiative aiming to bridge gender in STEM by inspiring women to take more STEM courses and careers. In partnership GE, and Kids Comp Camp organised an all girls coding camp dubbed ‘She Can Code Challenge’ on Friday, 24th August 2017. The camp was held at Safe Spaces Kenya located in Nairobi’s Eastlands Dandora. A total of 25 young girls, ages 12 to 18, from Mathare, Dandora, Kayole and Umoja neighbourhoods participated.
Get Started
The day begun with a couple of energizers then followed session dubbed ‘Tujuane; where trainers and learners got to know each other beyond their name. One by one the eager girls stood up, stating their name, their neighborhood and shoe size. It was a warm way to begin a rather cold day.
The Day’s Objective
The objective of the day was to help the girls learn why coding is important in today’s digital driven society and how they can start coding interactive activities. The challenge for the day was to animate their favorite logos by using scratch, a visual programming tool, developed by MIT to help young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively
The girls started by learning how to give commands using blocks. Each learning, to move the blocks from one point of the screen to the other, when we finally had a full sequence of code that did something. “Add the move block, under the event block”, says Lenah our scratch tutor for the day, “then press the green flag to make it all start.” Boom, the girls were all giggles and smiles, as the “sprite” the characters used in scratch — started to move.
The Sweet, Lunch hour.
Lunch was upon us, well not lunch, an experience was upon us. Through our gracious partners General Electric, they provided Pizza and soda for our enjoyment. It was a moment to realize how blessed we are and many a time we don’t even realize. One of the girls from Mathare seemed less enthused than the others about the food, upon asking we learnt that she had never eaten pizza before and wasn’t sure if it was safe. Funny, curious, sad, call it what you will, it’s true, not everyone has what you have, no matter how little, someone else will always have less. Be grateful always, and give even more always.
Happy ending.
At this point the girls were already coders, because they could now give the computer’s commands and they would execute it. However, Kids Comp Camp has never been one to do the simple, we had to animate the logos of the stakeholders of the session, first the Kids Comp Camp logo, then the General Electric logo.
With all the enthusiasm they could muster, these girls took it up, and soon before you knew it, they had done it. All around the stations as the trainers watched over their wards, even the tiniest of the girls had achieved at least a line of code.
Thanks to all the stakeholders of the day for making this event happen, Safe Spaces Kenya, General Electric and last but not least your friendly neighborhood Kids Comp Camp.
Event Photos:
