Comment by krsmith35 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krsmith35 | Hacker News Reader

"So if we want to get more girls to become programmers, we should give them more examples. Ideally in person..."

I am volunteering with a local "Code Club" to teach programming to 8-14 year olds. We have just tried to be open and gender neutral, ending up with between 10-25% female depending on the week. Purely subjective opinion, but Jessica Yuen from the Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/other-featu...) tutorials has been a huge example for these children (boys and girls).

I'd love to profile more examples in our code club sessions. Does anyone know of a central source for people willing to volunteer as "examples" for young computer scientists? If not, maybe we can start a google doc or something?

The SWE K-12 outreach (http://aspire.swe.org/) is probably close to what you're thinking of, though if you meant more of a peer-to-peer "dial a mentor" service I don't think I've seen one. Not that it couldn't exist.

Some other great organizations helping set examples and mentor high schoolers:

She++: http://sheplusplus.stanford.edu/

MentorNet: http://www.mentornet.net/

MentorSET: http://www.mentorset.org.uk/

Technovation: http://iridescentlearning.org/programs/technovation-challeng...

MIT: http://swe.mit.edu/outreach/

There are also several great organizations for women working in computing, who you could reach out to for mentors. PyLadies, DevChix, Systers, Anita Borg, etc... And local tech companies, at Google there were several folks working with local high schools who would put out internal calls for people to go and speak about the cool stuff they worked on.

Speaking of which, Google's Women Techmakers is also shaping up to be a great collection of women doing cool stuff in tech: https://developers.google.com/women-techmakers and https://plus.google.com/communities/100202454944694552166

Wow these are all great resources! Thank you. My club is in the Phoenix AZ suburbs, but thank goodness for webcam. I've patched in colleagues from my company (in MA) before. Of course the kids all wanted to know what video games they have made, and how much money programmers get paid :)

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