Learning from Dojos who have been successful in attracting & retaining girls

[Giustina Mizzoni]

Thank you to everyone who has introduced themselves in the previous discussion post. Its been really interesting to hear everyones background and the reasons they are passionate about this subject.

The first discussion thread I'm kicking off is centered on learning from the experience of Dojos. The aim of this discussion topic is to curate the comments into a document detailing ‘best practices’, top tips, and practical guidelines for both attracting girls and retaining girls into Dojos.

Here are a few questions to guide the discussion. (Do not feel you need to address all, or feel free to add other questions into the mix.)

• What factors have helped you in attracting girls into your Dojo?

• Have you experienced a ‘drop off’ of girls once they attend your Dojo?

• Did you do specific outreach to local girls schools? Was this successful?

• Have you spoken with the girls in your Dojo about why they enjoy attending? If so what reasons or factors do they normally cite?

• Do you find girls respond to different language when describing coding and its benefits?  eg focusing on the creative element

• Do you find girls respond better to a specific type of mentoring or learning?  

Whatever your experience both positive/negative of attracting and retaining girls into your Dojo will be useful to understand!

Look forward to generating discussion,

Giustina

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[Giustina Mizzoni]

Hi everyone, 

Just wanted to restart this again :) 

Have any of the members of this group achieved a good balance of girls & boys in their Dojo? If so what did you do (if anything!) to achieve this!

G

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[Rebecca Schatz]

Hi,

Rebecca from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA here.

We have never been successful in attracting more than about 25% girls to our CoderDojo Twin Cities, despite a great blend of female mentors and some very avid girl coders.   So we started a girls-only CoderDojo here too (Katie CoderDojo) that has been highly successful and is now almost as big as CoderDojoTC. CoderDojoTC welcomes 80 to 100 kids and teens per session,  Katie CoderDojo has a max of 75.  

Many girls and young women seem to prefer the all-girl environment, and we draw an additional pool of enthusiastic mentors who want to work with girls.  Katie CoderDojo is more structured in style (demos at the beginning and progressive challenges) with only 2 code groups (Scratch and AppInventor)

Looking forward to hearing the experiences of other CoderDojos on this important topic.

-Rebecca

[Niambh Scullion]

Hi Rebecca,

It's really lovely to read everyone's experiences, it is interesting that your experience is so like ours in DCU. The girls are really happy and enjoying each other's company.

My goal for them would be to move on to one of our mixed sessions, but I'm not seeing much of a draw for that from them.

Niambh

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