BBC: What can we do to get more women into coding?

[Paola Kathuria]

I thought that this article was interesting - not necessarily in a good way. I always get anxious when I read about people teaching themselves programming outside of best practices.

Is the forward/backward male/female difference true?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-5904577

What can we do to get more women into coding?

By Mary-Ann Russon
Technology of Business reporter, BBC News

The UK is facing an acute shortage of workers with digital skills - computer coders, cybersecurity experts and data analysts, are all in high demand.

And it's not just a problem for the UK: globally, two-thirds of technology firms are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, according to a recent report by recruitment firm Harvey Nash.

Its survey of 2,100 firms also showed that the proportion of women that make up technology teams has only been creeping very slowly higher - standing at only 25%, while just 12% of top technology executives are women.

So, given such startling statistics I decided to find out how easy it would be for a woman in her 30s, to learn to code in Python.

In case you are wondering, Python is a powerful, general purpose coding language and often the first language taught to undergraduates on computer science courses.

It is widely used in business - YouTube, for example, is largely written in Python.

Getting started

At the moment, if you want to learn to code, you need to pay for a class, teach yourself using online resources, or find a community willing to show you the ropes for free.

I thought I might have a bit of a head start here, having taught myself languages used to build websites back in the early 2000s.

So, I assumed I would be able to teach myself Python.

The first place I started was children's computing toys, hoping the goal of making robots move would keep me engaged and motivated.

But I quickly realised I was out of my depth - I had no idea how to use the software that came with the toys.

So, switching tactics I tried Code Academy, a popular online platform, which is free.

However, I found this intimidating. I was presented with an empty black prompt window that just said, "Type Hello World".

To help me learn, I attended Teach the Nation to Code, a free one-day Python coding workshop run by UK training firm, QA.

The course, which runs on Saturdays, was created by Shafeeq Muhammad, the principal technologist at QA, who credits learning to code with transforming his life.

The adult class was challenging - you had to really want to learn to code in order to stay engaged.

If you make mistakes in your code, it just doesn't do anything. But when it works, there's not much pay-off - just some lines on a screen.

I also took classes with Cypher Coders and Creator Academy to teach me Scratch - a coding language for children with a simple visual interface. Scratch can be used to create games, animations or even program robots.

The children's classes were much more fun, with exciting goals like building a video game or an interactive pet, but there wasn't much theory.

I also found the step change from learning Scratch to Python similarly jarring in the children's toys - you suddenly go from colourful blocks to an empty screen with no handholding.

So, what could help bridge this gap from fun games for kids, to more professional level complex coding?

Garry Law, founder of Australian coding training firm, Creator Academy, says IT education needs to be better.

"We need to teach kids coding with visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles, and we need to adapt this learning method for adults, to attract more people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)," he says.

Cypher Coders boss, Elizabeth Tweedale, goes even further. She believes that men and women often have different learning styles and coding education needs to reflect that.

She says men often follow a linear approach of going from A to Z when solving problems, while women often start from the problem and work backwards.

"We need to reinvent technology and coding environments [with] user interfaces to draw women in," she says.

Cost is also a big problem. According to Anna Brailsford, chief executive of social enterprise Code First: Girls (CFG), it typically costs £10,000 to learn coding and often there isn't a clear link between what is taught and the jobs available.

"Women are more likely to give up unless there's a clear career pathway," she says.

CFG gives women 13 weeks of intensive training and relates computer programming to people's interests, so they learn key skills useful on the job. CFG then places participants in tech careers based on their strengths.

Back at Creator Academy, girls now make up 40% of Mr Law's classes, in part because of an initiative set up by New South Wales, which gives parents AUD$100 (£54.45) a year, to spend on tech-related classes for kids.

Ms Tweedale suggests having highly-publicised hackathons with exciting prizes like money or internships with tech giants.

Beverley Newing, 28, a web developer at the Ministry of Justice, agrees the way we teach science and technology needs to change.

Mx Newing had hoped to study physics at university but failed to get the grades.

"I struggled a lot in the male-dominated maths classes during my International Baccalaureate," they tell the BBC.

"I didn't fit in and I struggled to approach the teacher when I didn't understand."

Broke and on benefits with a literature degree, Mx Newing decided to learn to code.

It was tough, as they couldn't afford classes and had to learn quickly to keep an internship.

Mx Newing credits CFG and charity, Codebar's, support in providing a community as being instrumental to them being able to turn their life around.

"I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't got that internship," they say.

"I think there's an inclusion problem and we need more paid internships in the industry so you can go and do it while still paying the bills."

[Peter Gutmann]

Paola Kathuria <pa...@limov.com> writes:

At the risk of getting into a huge amount of bikeshedding:

>I assumed I would be able to teach myself Python.

And there's the quoted author's problem. Python is a great tool if you
already know programming in some other language, but not something you'd want
to learn as your first language, for the reasons given by the author. What
you need is change in both the learner and the tools, from the tool side
something that'll teach you the basics of programming without getting in the
way too much and from the learner side a change in expectations from "I want
to create a full- blown sophisticated GUI app in ten minutes" to "I want to do
something vaguely interesting even if it's text-only". For example if we had
some sort of all-purpose symbolic instruction code specially target at
beginners, call it maybe ASIC-B (one of the variants without line numbers and
gotos), which allows interactive development and didn't require you to learn
half the language and its quirks just to write Hello World, and as the
learning examples simple text-based exercises or games, users could get used
to the *concept* of programming, totally alien stuff like a variable that can
hold different values, and how you can change those values, and use them in
control structures.

Just like Silvanus Thompson's "Calculus Made Easy" (1910), a lot of the learn-
to-program books from the 1980s are significant improvements on anything
published since then.

>I always get anxious when I read about people teaching themselves programming
>outside of best practices.

Once you've mastered the concepts, no matter what the language is, you can
then jump to whatever trendy languages and tools you need in practice. In
particular, teaching via "best practices" for at least the last twenty years
has equated to "force the fad language of the month down their throats even if
it's nearly impossible to do so", so it could be argued that *not* "learning
via best practice" is the way to go.

Peter.

[Paola Kathuria]

So, a few things irked me about the BBC article.

The journey from Python to Scratch just seemed bonkers to me.

I can see how Scratch is engaging, but is it possible to print out your Scratch program to must on later?

It is widely used in business - YouTube, for example, is largely written in Python.

I find it hard to believe that YouTube is built on Python. Maybe it's a legacy system. If it was being built now, what would they choose?

So, switching tactics I tried Code Academy, a popular online platform, which is free.
However, I found this intimidating. I was presented with an empty black prompt window that just said, "Type Hello World".

This triggered me because so many places use "Hello world" as the first programming example. It's lazy and non-sensical.

If you make mistakes in your code, it just doesn't do anything.

Ah, if only this was true!

Cypher Coders boss, Elizabeth Tweedale, goes even further. She believes that men and women often have different learning styles and coding education needs to reflect that. She says men often follow a linear approach of going from A to Z when solving problems, while women often start from the problem and work backwards.

I thought this was interesting and wondered if it was supported by research.

On Wednesday, 19 January 2022 at 12:24:26 UTC pgut001 wrote:

Teaching via "best practices" for at least the last twenty years

has equated to "force the fad language of the month down their throats even if
it's nearly impossible to do so", so it could be argued that *not* "learning
via best practice" is the way to go.

I anticipated someone pushback when I typed "best practices" (someone also commented in mail to me).

If you learn enough to be able to code and make something happen, it's comparable to anyone playing notes on a piano.

If programs were write once, run once and never read again, it wouldn't matter. But if you need to debug, expand, refactor, or take over someone else's code, your code matters. From choice of variables and procedure names, to modularisation and comments. These kinds of practical things are what I call 'best practice'.

I do always wonder if my opinion comes from righteousness because I did a degree in computing. But, in truth, I can't even remember if we were taught able readable and maintainable code. I probably learnt the importance once I had to deal with other people's crappy code in my early contracts, such as the lead programmer using in-built Omnis 7 variable names of #1, #2 and #3, etc, rather than defining new variables by purpose.

What do you reckon?

Paola

[Raoul Duke]

> ASIC-B

i feel like a language designed with good pedagogical ux in mind would should could also be a great day job language, no real inherent reason why not. 

CTM* tries to show layering of features in a language evolution graph, eg start immutably and later add mutation, later add FFI. 

what are if any the closest language ecosystems to something that is "cake & eat it too"?

* 

https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html

[Linda McIver]

Thanks for starting this discussion, Paola! Some really important points raised. I've found in my work that there is no such thing as a genuinely usable language, particularly for beginners. Python is one of the least worst, but they're all terrible in their own way. We could certainly be doing a lot more effective work on the usability of languages. There are huge issues with Scratch, including very poor visibility of system status. It is great for playing, terrible for trying to do specific, complex things, and awful for teaching programming. Good, perhaps, for making code seem less scary, but not much else. 

However, what I have also found is that the choice of language matters less than the motivation. If kids (and adults!) see the point of learning to program, and have a reason to want to get their code to work, they will put up with a lot (they shouldn't have to put up with as much as they do, but that's another battle!). I made the shift as an academic to problems that the students actually cared about because they solved real problems, then as a secondary teacher I shifted to teaching kids programming in the context of data science problems that enable them to solve real problems in their community. It massively increases their motivation, and gives them a reason to want to solve the problem. We've spent a lot of time, it seems to me, trying to make programming fun, when we'd have been better off making programming *meaningful*. That's the core of my work now. I've even written a book about it. :) (Check out Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World, or have a rummage through the blog at adsei.org if you want to know more.)

None of this means we shouldn't work to improve the usability of programming languages - as Raoul notes, a language that's better for learning should also be better for coding in! Less confusing, more readable, more consistent - these will all make for better programs, surely! But in the absence of better programming languages, we can certainly be teaching programming better.

Linda

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[Lauren Himbeault]

Hi Im new here and thought Id use this article as an opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Lauren and I'm a masters candidate at the University of Manitoba. I am also a sessional instructor for my university teaching undergraduate courses at different levels. My Area of research is in computer science education and pedagogy. I'm currently helping to build a new curriculum for a new introductory course so this actually could fit in very nicely with that. 

I found this article to be a bit misleading. The title suggests it's about the gender gap in computer science but the article itself feels more critical of how we're teaching computer science. I also feel a lot of generalization about women is occurring in the article without any evidence to back up the claims. It feels more like an opinion piece about why women don't like computer science there any actual survey data or facts being given. It's not to say that was being stated isn't true, I just feel like it makes it seem less credible. I agree that there's no standardization about how we teach computer science and I do believe that we as post secondary institutes, don't offer enough differentiated instruction for the different types of learners that we encounter. I'm not sure if that's a gender thing though. I actually think it's more personality thing, which may be related to gender but doesn't have to be exclusive to it. If you took a survey of people on the street and ask them to describe what a computer scientist is I think we all know we'd get a very narrow picture of of what represents our population. That's not even necessarily just gender wise. I think the article should have focussed it's critique on how we're teaching and the limitations with that versus bringing the gender gap into it. 

I know the gender gap in tech is a sexy topic but I feel this article separated men and women and effectively, the theme was, women like to be engaged the way children do with more fun and less intimidation and men don't. This just simply isn't true and should be associated more with personalities and learning styles than genders.

Anyways, that's was bugged me about this article. Still a good read bringing attention to the gaps that need to be filled it just feels like opinions and not much more than that in terms of usefulness in data or perspectives.

[Simon Butler]

On 2022-01-19 at 04:49 -08, Paola Kathuria <paola...@gmail.com> wrote...

> Cypher Coders boss, Elizabeth Tweedale, goes even further. She believes that men and women often have different learning
> styles and coding education needs to reflect that. She says men often follow a linear approach of going from A to Z when
> solving problems, while women often start from the problem and work backwards.
>
> I thought this was interesting and wondered if it was supported by research.
>

Others on the list may have better examples from the SE education
literature. There is an interesting paper from ICSE 2018 which examines
gender differences in approaches to using software development tooling
in OSS projects.

@inproceedings{Mendez:2018:a,
author = {Mendez, Christopher and Padala, Hema Susmita and Steine-Hanson, Zoe and Hilderbrand, Claudia and Horvath, Amber and Hill, Charles and Simpson, Logan and Patil, Nupoor and Sarma, Anita and Burnett, Margaret},
title = {Open Source Barriers to Entry, Revisited: A Sociotechnical Perspective},
crossref = {conf:icse:2018},
pages = {1004--1015},
doi = {10.1145/3180155.3180241},
keywords = {gender, newcomer, open source software},
}

The paper appears to be open access (https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180241)

There is also an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Margaret
Burnett at
https://www.se-radio.net/2019/09/episode-380-margaret-burnett-on-gender-cognitive-styles-usability-bugs/
which deals more widely with gender and software development. The
interviewer is Felienne Hermans (https://www.felienne.com/).

Simon

[Paola Kathuria]

Linda McIver  wrote:

I've found in my work that there is no such thing as a genuinely usable language, particularly for beginners.

What I have also found is that the choice of language matters less than the motivation. If kids (and adults!) see the point of learning to program, and have a reason to want to get their code to work, they will put up with a lot (they shouldn't have to put up with as much as they do, but that's another battle!). I made the shift as an academic to problems that the students actually cared about because they solved real problems, then as a secondary teacher I shifted to teaching kids programming in the context of data science problems that enable them to solve real problems in their community. It massively increases their motivation, and gives them a reason to want to solve the problem. We've spent a lot of time, it seems to me, trying to make programming fun, when we'd have been better off making programming *meaningful*. That's the core of my work now. I've even written a book about it. :) (Check out Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World, or have a rummage through the blog at adsei.org if you want to know more.)

Ah, this is brilliantly said. I couldn’t agree more.

I absolutely rage against non-sensical examples for programs as a form of teaching.

The teaching of maths, physics, chemistry and computing really need problems to solve that are relevant to the people being taught.

I gave up on a JavaScript evening class, firstly because of the initial dreadful "Hello World" example, but because the next example program was completely non-sensical and would never be approached in the real world. While I was pedantically trying to make sense of the example, the person giving the class had moved on and I was behind. I suspect that this might happen in school or college teaching, that people lose (or don’t gain) motivation or get left behind because of non-sensical programming examples/problems - it would be interesting to study. 

It’s like 3D printing. For ages, people were saying “what the heck is the point?”

But, imagine waving your hands over the first telephone and telling people to look at the contraption and expect them to understand its usefulness and applications.

3D printing is only interesting and motivating when you have specific problems to solve that are meaningful to you.

Similarly, programming languages might as well just be contraptions. The carrot is the unsolved problem. A brand new language is aeffectively a stick.

I’ll go hunt for your book, Linda!

Paola

—

www.paolability.com

[Raoul Duke]

> 3D printing is only interesting and motivating when you have specific problems to solve that are meaningful to you.

Please beware of making the same-but-opposite error as those folks who
don't present what you believe are useful specific problems during
teaching.

[Raoul Duke]

$0.02,

* Unless you have a personal tutor, and a good one to boot, i think it
will be unfortunately rare to find a lecture, mooc, book, etc.
teaching the same programming thing N different ways to cover N
learning modalities.

* Do we even really know what the modalities are for learning? Does
the research on e.g. math & science learning styles port over well to
programming at all?

* As a day job programmer, I don't think that I often see other
programmers who notice let alone care about the accidental
complexities. Some of it is just a sad process of inurement. The
entire programming world is full of stuff that you have to sort of
either handwave away (and pray it works) or actually teach and learn.
Cf. python venv, for example. My spouse has taken multiple "one week
python crash courses" at/via a tippy-top-tier higher learning
institution within the context of bioinformatics, and they have all
pretty much consistently been kind of a train wreck for people who
don't already know all sorts of accidental complexity information.

* The accidental complexity only makes all other considerations more
of an uphill battle, seems to me.

* Thus I feel like it all is truly kinda like that footnote of
Wittgenstein's: you can lead a horse to a robotics class, but it is up
to the horse to wade through the things that don't jive for them and
look for anything that might click. There's a lot of noise hiding any
signal.

? Maybe if we have an AI that can customize teaching paths and
generate the learning modality variations of the information, we could
have our star trek teaching machine. :-)

? Or maybe somebody could invent a programming language ecosystem
where multiple modalities are all surfaced and interoperable and
interactive. "Views" onto the underlying code.

[Linda McIver]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2022 at 04:32, Paola Kathuria <pa...@limov.com> wrote:

Linda McIver  wrote:

I've found in my work that there is no such thing as a genuinely usable language, particularly for beginners.

What I have also found is that the choice of language matters less than the motivation. If kids (and adults!) see the point of learning to program, and have a reason to want to get their code to work, they will put up with a lot (they shouldn't have to put up with as much as they do, but that's another battle!). I made the shift as an academic to problems that the students actually cared about because they solved real problems, then as a secondary teacher I shifted to teaching kids programming in the context of data science problems that enable them to solve real problems in their community. It massively increases their motivation, and gives them a reason to want to solve the problem. We've spent a lot of time, it seems to me, trying to make programming fun, when we'd have been better off making programming *meaningful*. That's the core of my work now. I've even written a book about it. :) (Check out Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World, or have a rummage through the blog at adsei.org if you want to know more.)

Ah, this is brilliantly said. I couldn’t agree more.

Thank you! It's an ongoing theme with me these days.

 

I absolutely rage against non-sensical examples for programs as a form of teaching.

The teaching of maths, physics, chemistry and computing really need problems to solve that are relevant to the people being taught.

Yes, absolutely. Get kids engaged on a problem they care about, amazing things happen. We waste a lot of time throwing things at them that are wildly irrelevant and fundamentally uninteresting, and wonder why they disengage. 

 

I gave up on a JavaScript evening class, firstly because of the initial dreadful "Hello World" example, but because the next example program was completely non-sensical and would never be approached in the real world. While I was pedantically trying to make sense of the example, the person giving the class had moved on and I was behind. I suspect that this might happen in school or college teaching, that people lose (or don’t gain) motivation or get left behind because of non-sensical programming examples/problems - it would be interesting to study. 

Yes absolutely. My kids ditched tech subjects because they were incredibly tedious, so what they taught them was that tech was boring and pointless. Which, incidentally, is often what the "fun" approach using robots and the like often achieves too. 

 

It’s like 3D printing. For ages, people were saying “what the heck is the point?”

But, imagine waving your hands over the first telephone and telling people to look at the contraption and expect them to understand its usefulness and applications.

3D printing is only interesting and motivating when you have specific problems to solve that are meaningful to you.

Similarly, programming languages might as well just be contraptions. The carrot is the unsolved problem. A brand new language is aeffectively a stick.

I love this line! Beautifully put.

 

I’ll go hunt for your book, Linda!

Excellent! I'll be fascinated to hear your thoughts. :)

--

Author of Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World
Blog: Exploring Life, Parenting and Social Justice: http://lindamciver.wordpress.com/     

Founder: The Australian Data Science Education Institute: http://adsei.org               

[Linda McIver]

I would love to see some research on this. Take kids learning to program in the context of real problems and compare their motivation and learning with those learning the same skills in the context of meaningless toy examples. I've done that in my own classes and seen the impact, but I don't do research anymore, I don't have the time or the resources. I do know that it worked in my classes, and in the classes of the teachers I now train. It doesn't, of course, make learning to program easy. We need to do a whole lot more work on making real world languages more usable, and even then I doubt it will ever be easy. It's real problem solving. It's hard. But kids who have motivation can get past hard. Kids without motivation will not, and why should they?

"We teachers" have not tried everything, there are always new things to learn. I've been teaching since 1999, in tertiary, secondary, and even primary settings. My professional experience is more than an anecdote to me, but I accept that researchers have no reason to trust it. Perhaps you could test it.

kind regards,

Linda

On Mon, 24 Jan 2022 at 23:58, Richard Bornat <ric...@bornat.me.uk> wrote:

It’s really easy to imagine that there’s an easy solution — like motivating examples — that will solve the decades-old problem of Why Don’t Most People Easily Learn To Program. There really isn’t. Just as there are no known solutions to Why Don’t More Children Understand Mathematics. 

We teachers have really tried the motivation issue, in lots of directions. But try again, why not? Just beware the Hawthorne Effect, and take no anecdotal evidence. Particularly your own, or mine. 

Richard Bornat

Sent from my iPhone

On 23 Jan 2022, at 22:52, Linda McIver <linda....@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Richard Bornat]

It’s really easy to imagine that there’s an easy solution — like motivating examples — that will solve the decades-old problem of Why Don’t Most People Easily Learn To Program. There really isn’t. Just as there are no known solutions to Why Don’t More Children Understand Mathematics. 

We teachers have really tried the motivation issue, in lots of directions. But try again, why not? Just beware the Hawthorne Effect, and take no anecdotal evidence. Particularly your own, or mine. 

Richard Bornat

Sent from my iPhone

On 23 Jan 2022, at 22:52, Linda McIver <linda....@gmail.com> wrote:



--

[alex]

Hi all,

My understanding is that 'learning styles' simply do not exist, and
are treated as an urban myth in the education research field.
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687/

I fully agree though that computing education examples need to be
meaningful and situated in the real world. Mark Guzdial's excellent
work on 'media computation' demonstrates this.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGc6clf_Wt4

Best wishes

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[Peter Gutmann]

Paola Kathuria <paola...@gmail.com> writes:

>What do you reckon?

My argument was more aimed at the "how do we get people interested in
programming" aspect of things, that if people are so turned off by their first
experience with programming then you've already lost them at step 0 and will
never get a chance to teach them good programming style at step 3, or 5, or
27. So get them hooked on whatever works at step 0 ("here kid, have some
drugs!"), and then once they've seen what's possible you can go for the high-
hurdle steps of working with languages like Python, Java, and C++, and
programming style.

Another thing with articles like this is that they tend to focus on specific
demographic X and then wonder why X doesn't feature strongly in programmer
circles. There are many, many, many values of X for which you can do this.

What about turning 180 degrees and looking in the opposite direction, what
demographic *does* feature strongly in programmer circles? We've actually got
quite a bit of data on this, and unless it's changed in recent years the group
that's drawn to programming for reasons other than "that's where the money is"
has been INTP/INTJs (yeah, I know, MBTI shows how old this data is), and
historically white male INTP/INTJs although that may also have changed over
time.

Next step is, why is that particular demographic drawn to programming? And if
a bunch of natural born geeks want to get into this and non-natural-born-geeks
don't, why not leave them to it?

Peter.

[Enda Dunican]

Raoul,

On that point, many of the introduction to programming textbooks I have encountered are based on what the author thinks are the best ways to teach it and using examples that they think are cool - it's all about what they think is cool, right? In this context, many people think that every child loves robots (one of my colleagues was convinced of this until I burst his bubble). I switch off as soon as I hear of anyone presenting anything with "robo" in the title as a panacea for teaching programming to kids. In the context of Linda's message, has anyone ever written a textbook based on an ethnographic study of children learning to program? Linda, I have just ordered your book and am looking forward to reading it. I hope all my PPIG friends have managed to stay safe during this awful pandemic.

Regards,

​ 

Enda  

Dr. Enda Dunican 
Lecturer in Computing,
Dept. of Computing and Networking,
Institute of Technology Carlow,
Kilkenny Road,
Carlow,
Ireland.
Tel:  353-(0)59-9175525
Email:  enda.d...@itcarlow.ie

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Sent: Sunday 23 January 2022 18:53
To: PPIG <ppig-d...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [ppig-discuss] BBC: What can we do to get more women into coding?

 

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