Keeping girls coding with a sprinkling of Unicorns and Slime.

I’d like to share some simple tips I’ve picked up in the last two of years on how to specifically keep the girls in your coding class engaged and interested.

My name is Darren Cotterill and I teach a Code Club at Seaforth Public School on Sydney’s Northern Beaches to Year 3 students.

We’ve been lucky from the start with classes of roughly 50/50 boys and girls, so I wanted to pay special attention to keeping it fun for the girls so they don’t drop out.

Not stereotyping the girls and boys is really important, but I definitely noticed differences in what they enjoyed, so wanted to make the most of this.

After a few months of generally following the Code Club Scratch curriculum, some of the girls progress slowed down and I found them a little less interested.

The games projects mainly appealed to the boys and the girls seemed to favour creativity and liked producing things to show their friends, but were less interested in the gameplay itself.

Everyone seems to get motivation by ‘showing off’ their creations, but the girls seemed to get an extra buzz. They got really excited about publishing work and “being on the internet!”

Some particularly popular projects where they could show this creativity were:

• The Code Club HTML Birthday card.
• The Hour of Code Scratch Christmas card. Some of them sent this to family members overseas, or their parents or teachers, which was another great way to show what they’d accomplished.

I also noticed that motivation changed a lot based on the context of the project, such as the graphics and characters, or the general topic of a game.

This may be obvious but most girls love…..

UNICORNS!!! … and cupcakes… and rainbows… and slime!

Of course, most boys love unicorns too, but the girls generally tipped over from disinterested to super happy when they could use their creativity and introduce this type of graphic into their projects.

It was more difficult to find images for the girls that they asked for, particularly transparent gifs for project characters. A little prep before that class to dig out some in advance really helped them along, so I’d recommend you go in armed with a USB stick full of this stuff.

Making slime was particularly popular with the girls in our last class so I suggested a group of them got together to build a slime making game. They got a bit stuck, so I built a template project for them to work from, which they absolutely loved!

If you can find a topic and some graphics that will get them inspired, this is a great way to help them along.

This year, I’ve had groups of girls from last year’s class repeatedly ask if they can do more programming this year. This is such a rewarding feeling, so something must be going ok.

My observations are only based on two years’ classes so far, so I’d love to hear others’ opinions on this, and any other tips to keep girls going for their future in coding and STEM.