April 24, 2015
A trio of Mangos, including Airrick, Jacqui, and Sam, spent one of their recent evenings listening to 3 girls ages 10 to 12 talk about their experience learning code and why they love building things for the web at the Coffee and Code Meetup.
They had all attended a code camp for girls that introduced them to the basics of coding through tools like Mozilla Thimble for HTML & CSS, and Scratch developed by the MIT Media Lab for programming.
With approximately 50 people watching each of these brave girls got on stage and presented an example of the work they have done and their thoughts on coding for 5-10 minutes. It was inspiring to see their determination to share their passion and express the joy that learning to code has created in their lives while under the spotlight.
We saw a website dedicated to the awareness of the endangered Arctic Fox, heard about how coding has allowed one girl to embrace the title of “tech girl” in her class, and saw how kids today can program their own games through visual based editors. It was a great opportunity to see a glimpse into the future role learning to code will play in education at the elementary school level.
The inherent ability to create something from nothing that they could share with family and friends provided a rewarding experience and allowed them to be as creative as they wanted to be. It’s this type of creative freedom that drives many people to the world of design and development later in life. We see its introduction at a young age as an important opportunity to reach kids and show them that creativity and structure go hand in hand when designing and developing anything.
The next generation will be makers, and it’s our role to provide them with the tools that will allow them to change our world from a young age. We hope to see more integration of code classes into public education in the near future. We’ll also be continuing to contribute to the coding community locally and abroad to help create more opportunities like this for kids.
Contact the organizer for more information on code camps, and how you can find kids in your community who love to code. Special thanks to the organizers behind the Coffee and Code Meetup, and their sponsors for putting the event together.
Thanks for reading.