Girls Learning To Code

Come tomorrow (July 31), some 37 girls from communities in the Corporate Area, will complete two weeks of fun but intensive training in coding.

The girls, who are under the age of 18, are participating in coding summer camps at centres on Deanery Road and McGregor Gardens in Kingston.

The staging of the two-week camps is in keeping with efforts to get more females involved in the field of coding. The inaugural girls coding camp took place in 2014, with a number of workshops held throughout the year.

Minister of State in the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, Hon. Julian Robinson, who spoke to JIS News during a tour of the camp at the McGregor Gardens Community Access Point on July 29, said the programme is aimed at addressing the disparity in the male to female ratio in the information technology (IT) sector.

“If you look at the IT sector, many young ladies tend to shy away from the profession because they think it is male dominated. We are exposing them to the art of coding, using particular software tools,” he informed.

The girls participating in the camps are learning to code the fun way, utilising the Turtle Art software, which follows a sequence of commands that enables the user to make beautiful images on their computers.

“We are hoping to expand this programme, where we target girls, who are in schools that are part of the Tablet in Schools project, because they would have had the technology already,” Mr. Robinson said.

He informed that there are plans to form “girls who code clubs” in schools at the start of the new academic year in September, so that the knowledge can be passed on to other young ladies.

“We are using government assets to leverage knowledge, training and exposure,” Mr. Robinson said.

A participant of the summer programme, 15-year-old Yanique Watt, said that through learning the elements involved in coding she was able to create her own online profile.

The summer programme is funded by the Musson Foundation.