Real Tales of Learning Computer Science as a High School Girl
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'What is that?' I asked my sophomore friend in chorus what the jumbled letters, numbers, returns, spaces, indents, and parentheses on her failed test meant. She shrugged and responded, 'It’s comp sci. I can’t understand it—this is all bullshit.' The only other sophomore friend I had was a boy, and he told me computer science was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. With only these two views on computer science to refer to, I entered my intro course clueless and under the impression that computer science was for boys.
This struck me as somewhat oddly constructed. I'm sure her two friends were different from each other in a great many ways, but she settled on sex as the differentiating factor. She goes on to say
To put it simply, the reason for [boys having a stronger CS background before taking the class] comes down to video games. Boys are expected sit in their dungeons of junk food and fiddle with their PlayStations and computers (I can’t even think of a popular video game to mention).
That doesn't make much sense to me either. Most video games don't teach anything about computer science. They may serve as a vehicle to get children interested in what computers can do, but no CS skills are required to play Halo.
More generally, parts of the responses seem forced. I get the impression that there was a fairly detailed question posed to these students with suggestions to address certain topics. For example, half the responses contain the word "humanities". I wouldn't expect most high school students to choose that word on their own. I'd expect to see more specific subjects like art, history or English. I'd really like to see the exact question they were asked.
1. First part of the answer is simple: Boys like videogames. They play videogames. Videogames are a great vehicle for getting interested in "Hmm, I wanna make a better awesomer videogame ... wonder how I go about doing that". Curiosity takes care of the rest.
2. It is, apparently, culturally acceptable for a boy to arse around on a computer all day, while the same does not hold true for a girl. This makes it harder for girls to learn subjects that take huge amounts of "being alone and thinking".
That's true, but it doesn't seem to me that a large percentage of programmers I know got interested in programming that way. I haven't conducted a formal survey, but that's the impression I have. It's very possible that my impression is wrong or that I'd get different results talking to a high school CS class than programmers in their 20s and 30s.
It is, apparently, culturally acceptable for a boy to arse around on a computer all day, while the same does not hold true for a girl.
I think that's less true now than it used to be in large part due to the increase in social uses of computers. Some of those social uses lend themselves to the sort of customization that would get people interested in coding as above. I'm thinking specifically of things like FBPurity, a browser extension that hides unwanted content on Facebook.
There's certainly an underlying issue with cultural stereotypes where boys are expected to tinker with technical/mechanical things and girls aren't. The distinction might be entirely arbitrary, as girls are expected to tinker with things thought of as feminine. Few people would be surprised by a girl making alterations to her clothing.
I don't know any programmers who didn't get in to programming that way.
That said, I do work at a game company, so I meet more game programmers that not, but even in my university days, all the serious students had started programming before they entered, and the initial motivation for that was games.
> I don't know any programmers who didn't get in to programming that way.
My first attempt at programming was asking our TRS-80, in English, if it would make a laser sound. "Syntax error" was it's reply.
But yeah trading stories about mucking with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get games working is par for the course when I meet tech people in their 20s and 30s.
So maybe we need to better advertise all the creative potential of programming in a variety of fields. I know if you had told high school freshman me about using programming to make websites, I would not have cared one bit. But if you showed me how I could make generative art and music or poetry or 3d graphics, I would've been very excited.
It's been a long time but I recall gender being a huge differentiating factor in many aspects of high school: many activities especially sports, fashion, and friends are the big ones. Furthermore, high school is when biological sex differences really start to manifest.
So while I mostly agree with your skepticism particularly with regards to leading questions, it's really not farfetched for a high school freshman to be preoccupied with gender roles.
Personally I think her comment about video games is a simplified rationalization and take it with a grain of salt. It's her opinion and has some merit but there's almost certainly more to it, both reality and her own perception of it.
These universities demonstrate remarkable short-sightedness. Studying different subjects, particularly at the undergraduate level, makes people intellectually well-rounded and far more interesting. Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time.
It's fascinating, in retrospect, the things people will come up with to try to make themselves feel superior.
Sure, we had some occasional teasing ("H and Less Stress" was another one) but I found it invaluable to go through H&SS' general studies curriculum. Everyone in H&SS studies philosophy, history, communications, economics, writing, and math (among others) in addition to their core major classes.
A double-major typically means you use major A's elective slots to take the core classes for major B, and vice versa. The upshot is that as a double-major, after sophomore year I would have no time to take any classes outside of those 2 departments. Counter-intuitive as it seems, staying a single-major allowed me to take a much greater variety of classes.
It seems to me that the highest level of CS education possible is a combination of theoretical CS, programming, as well as a ferocious study of the humanities. The best and the highest goal (in my opinion, obviously) is to build a wide understanding of the world around you, integrating many different thought processes and situations into your daily existence. Programming is "easy". Software engineering is something we learn in industry. Why should we be trained in those - let's get educated?
Bad example. Imagine Leonardo attending any modern day university for education. It's also a bad example because Leonardo did much, much more than painting and engineering.
I do agree it's a bad idea to split students by degree by more than a few miles, though. I'd avoid any school that did that.
I don't know why sites still use them.
I had to switch to the desktop version, repeatedly, until it actually took, then everything worked fine.
Which would be ok, if the OnSwipe user experience didn't suck so much for end users. I wish they'd publish a list of sites using onswipe so I could just skip those sites.
Initially, I was excited. Hey, here's this girl taking computer science. But towards the end, I think I'm the only one who walked away really learning Java and ended up "coaching" her through all her homework, basically just telling her what to type although trying to make sure she understood the concepts each step of the way. I ended up disappointed because she only wanted to pad her resume instead of really learn computer science. Maybe it was taking the class online that didn't let her get interested in the subject, or maybe she just wanted to get the grade and get it over with.
The point is, I think we need to do a better job getting kids in general interested in computer science, not just girls, if we want more girls to go into computer science. Get rid of this misconception that it's just graybeards in a dark room hacking away through the night and put it in kids heads that computer science, or even just programming, is something everyone can do and have fun doing. And maybe try to de-emphasize getting a grade as a goal and emphasize actual learning as a goal. But most importantly, expand computer science availability in high school, so you don't have to resort to taking online classes, which I think are a bad idea in general but particularly bad for kids in high school who are still developing study habits.