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Comment by 1auralynn | Hacker News Reader

The real way we're going to see equity in girls going into computer science/tech is for it to be an academic requirement, or at least an honors-level course in all high schools. In my high school in the 90's, computer science was practically a vo-tech class so none of the smart girls took it - hobbyist boys were the ones with the most experience going into college. I had an engineer dad, was super into computers, and I didn't even think of taking it.

Another approach is for it to become a more acceptable hobby for girls, but the social pressure is strong still for girls in the opposite direction. I think that one's a harder battle in a lot of ways.

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Changing the education system to train children for next generation jobs? That's just ridiculous, how could that possibly help /s.

Totally agree with you here. I think middle school is actually the prime age to start teaching it but not the drag/drop scratch/block type stuff you see in the lower grades. It should be a requirement just like Math and English.

Is there something wrong with the drag and drop approach? I find that working with kids on programming lego robots through their drag and drop approach is fairly engaging to them and does communicate concepts pretty well (loops, arrays, variables and so on). Of course you need to move them to a more "grown up" syntax eventually, but I suspect that comes as they need to solve more complex programs.

I think the drag/drop tools are great for the younger kids but once they reach middle school age they are generally ready for something more.

I periodically teach middle school coding workshops. One of the top questions the kids ask at the start of a new workshop is will they be using scratch or hand coding. They associate scratch with the young kids and want more control by this age.

Scratch of course is a very well known drag and drop coding environment, but it has been used in the UK to produce programs that can achieve A* grades at GCSE. Scratch can handle variable casting, iteration, IF statements and lots more besides. I have a whole bunch of 12 year olds who are all over Scratch, producing great code, and not at all perceiving it as somehow less than Java or Python. In fact last year, my 14 year old Year 10s came second in a Scratch competition in the Middle East, winning Apple Watches. So yes drag and drop tools can be seen as being a tad babyish, but when pushed they can be very effective.

In my country, it is an obligatory class at the equivalent of the US middle school level (10-14 year old).

However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were in my school.

I still excelled at it, mostly because of books (the Internet wasn't as widespread as it is today), and was a part of the state-sponsored small contests that test student's knowledge in that subject. Finished first on the municipality level, shared the second position on the regional level, and didn't go to the state level competition (was a bit too far away). That's what made me pursue IT further.

However, all I've ever learned during those four years was:

* Installing a pirated copy of Windows XP on desktops.

* "Blind typing" (typing properly on QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keyboard) and clicking on things in MS Office (2003) to make the document appear as in given screenshot.

* Mashing two malfunctioning desktops together to create a functioning one.

* Very basic programming (mostly if-else statements and loops). In QBASIC (from 1991). In 2008. (edit: This is what the competitions were about.)

My point being: You can still introduce it as an obligatory subject and fuck it up pretty badly. Including myself, two out of 120 kids in that school in my generation continued pursuing IT by joining specialized high schools (also a thing in my country) dedicated to IT. Neither me nor the second kid are female.

So, while I agree that it's a step in the right progress (the one which my country made in the second half of '00s, but fucked up pretty badly in its execution), it's far from being the final step. It brought us the equivalent of nothingness in spreading the IT. The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Very interesting. What country are you from?

"However, doing something as complicated as "computing and informatics" (a literal translation of the subject name) that early in the school education just made it absolutely terrible, much worse than the traditional classes were in my school."

Oh wow! Yeah, that seems like a little much for middle school. I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript. Let's not scare kids away at this age just yet and it sounds like the program your school had did just that :(

"The IT is still associated as a "male field", regardless of the fact that the subject is obligatory for everyone in that age range for about 15 years."

Honestly, I am not even so sure that requiring it will necessarily increase the count of women that go into this field. If anything, it will at least introduce it to more women showing them possible opportunities. I as a women in tech for 20 years have my own theories on why many women don't go into this profession but they are unpopular opinions here.

The main reason I would love to see it included as a main subject is because I want our youth (men and women) to be prepared for the jobs of our future. I truly believe that almost every profession will require programmers or tech specific roles in the very near future and our education system is not preparing our youth for that.

Alright, I'm going to go deeply out of the topic here, but it's necessary in order to give you a full answer, for you to understand my frustration, and for you to understand how fucked up that obligatory subject could really get.

> What country are you from?

Bosnia & Herzegovina.

> I was thinking more so at the level of teaching them how to code fun stuff in Python or JavaScript.

Yup, I am all up for that. I am the first one to applaud and donate to smaller projects that are aiming in that direction.

Meanwhile, the government (on the district level, think: District of Columbia) signs a deal with Microsoft in which Microsoft gives a substantial discount to their education platform, such projects get shoved away, and people are now being taught in other slightly more up-to-date Microsoft-dependent technologies. Of course, none of the licenses are provided to the students themselves to have at home, so piracy is at its peak. In fact, the only cases of prosecution for piracy I've ever heard of inside Bosnia is the prosecution of businesses that can't show Microsoft's licenses when asked for them by the regulators. Once you are being asked for them, you better have the boxes or receipts somewhere in your closet. It doesn't matter if you're using them or not. Good luck convincing the random inspector that your company is not Microsoft-reliant.

In other words, I haven't seen anyone using any non-Microsoft OS before I started messing around with Linux-based operating systems myself when I was 18. To this day, out of all the local people I've ever met personally, I could list on top of my fingers the amount of local people I've seen using non-Microsoft OS (as in Macbooks, the amount of Linux users I've met in person is still 0).

From my time in that middle-school equivalent, I've also went to a IT-specialized high school and an IT-specialized college. Around 90% of all IT-related topics, 90% of them you are simply unable to run on anything not made by Microsoft. The moment I found out I was supposed to start learning server administration exclusively in Microsoft Server was the moment when I quit that college. I've managed to win some smaller fights (like submitting essays in .odt instead of .doc(x) which was listed as "obligatory"), but this was way out of my reach.

So yeah, it's no longer just the ridiculous educational system, it's a ridiculous educational system that's now backed up financially by Microsoft. The only hope of breaking this monopoly is during the negotiations about joining the EU, but realistically, that won't happen any time soon unless something drastic happens.

So yeah, here I am, two years after I've made that decision to quit college, with two years of work experience working with open source exclusively, on a Mozilla-sponsored fellowship, into month four of waiting for the work permit to get the fuck away from this country, writing this comment on HN because I'm technically unemployed if the EU country I'm applying for work permit with doesn't give me a work visa really soon. If it goes well, I will finally break free of the chains possessed by simply being interested in the "wrong thing" in a wrong country. If not, realistically, the best I could do to even have a job in the IT field in my country is to return to Microsoft.

How hard could it be? Make a movie like "Hackers" with a gender balanced cast and a hot, badass female lead. Heck, Angelina Jolie in Hackers was enough to pull me in.

As long as the social pressure provides friction, classes won't make girls much more likely to take up technology - any more than opening up Home Ec to both genders gave us a generation of men choosing to learn to bake.

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