Even though I’m a writer, I imagine I’d have difficulty mastering source code. Code is written using text described as “human-readable computer language.” I’d like to think I write human-readable language, it’s the computer technical writing I fall down on.
Morse code, an electrical coding system, has been around for over 150 years. You might think of it in laymen’s terms as an early simplified form of source code.Then and now, coding is a way to convert plain language to communicate information or data through a medium using text and symbols and re-convert them (called encoding) back to a medium any recipient can understand.
Broadly speaking, computer programmers use source code to create applications to be used as a form of executable readable files. It is essentially the software of the machine’s hard drives.
Kimberly Bryant, a longtime biotech engineer, had sent her daughter Kai to a summer camp. Kai was spending hours each week playing interactive video games so she attended a computing summer camp. Kai told her mother of feeling disappointed that only a few girls attended the computing course, and that she was the only African American girl present. She also told her mother that the counselors gave the boys much more attention than the girls.
This inspired Kimberly Bryant to found Black Girls Code (BGC) in 2011, a non-profit organization with its mission to provide “technology education to African-American girls ages 7–17.” Bryant hoped to increase the underrepresented demographic of African American girls within the technology industry.
Today, BGC offers computer programming as well as “website/robot/mobile application-building courses.” Her goal is to help provide the technology skills that African American girls would use to fill a represented portion of the computing jobs as the industry grows.
Bryant was quoted in Ebony magazine as saying, “I wanted to find a way to engage and interest my daughter in becoming a digital creative instead of just a consumer, and I did not find other programs that were targeted to girls like her from underrepresented communities.”
As Black Girls Code strive to “create a new age of women of color in technology” their motto is – “Imagine. Build. Create.”
Learn new things here
This site is a good place to learn new things, like Vidda’s piece here and iBrattleboro certainly has its own source code.
Links
Black Girls Code imagine. build. create. – Black Girls Code, BlackGirlsCode, Women of Color in Technology
Coders Early Love For Technology | Kimberly’s #PassionProject – YouTube
BlackGirlsCode | Facebook
Pretty cool story here Vidda. Thanks!
First saw this story...
First saw this story a couple of months ago, ran into it again trolling the net and thought it might make a good education story.
Glad it did!
Go Time
I had to learn to code late in life as an adaption to my work as a multimedia artist. My early days of making media were all analog, very tactile, somewhat time bound. With the advent of the Web, and Flash, coding became a necessity. After the initial headache, I found the challenge thrilling. The precision. The search for elegance in form and formula. The immediacy of rendering digitally. My newfound prowess made me wish I had better math teachers growing up, because now I knew and understood the power of algorithmic and algebraic conception in a visceral way.
I began teaching code to kids as part of my work in the local elementary schools. Simple object oriented script powered Lego Mindstorms. HTML is as easy as sandwich making once you get the hang of it. Make a web page, it was like having your message in a bottle placed on a launch pad with liftoff leading to orbit around the world.
My job was eliminated due to ‘budget cuts’ . Now kids in Brattleboro get no technology training. It was seen as a distraction from the need to gain prowess for testing. I’m still not over that. Small mindedness.
I saw coding make those kids feel like astronauts..Suddenly their horizons were unlimited…Too bad the mission was scrapped here. Glad others keep the dream alive elsewhere.
Public schools no longer
Public schools no longer place any value on letting our kids explore, create, imagine, excel in being individuals. The mandatory testing – designed by big corporations who know nothing about what makes a child want to learn – is sucking the last creative and individual thought from our kids minds. Teachers are no longer valued or needed unless they can produce the highest test scores from their classes. I imagine being a public school teacher now must feel like dying a slow, suffocating death.
Shouldn't the birth of a suckling babe be the birth of a mind?
Kalden: “Corporations sucking the last creative thought from kid’s minds..”
Is this lament heard round the world from all the daughters and sons of freedom?
We are not clones.
Shouldn’t the birth of a suckling baby also be the birth of a mind?
Why do we try to make kids think and believe like us?
Are adults so insecure with themsleves that they think our kids are mere clay in their hands?
Don’t they have their own “Go Time?”
Are we really all just another customer or number?
As a mother of 4, former
As a mother of 4, former teacher and grandmother of a bright, curious, creative child, I can say with no hesitation that COMMON CORE is the worst thing that has ever happened to public education. The Department of Education bought into the fairy tale that bloodless, money sucking corporations know how best to “educate” the children of America. Teachers are no longer entrusted to nurture curiosity and initiative. They are forced to be time keepers, record breakers for test scores that provide nothing of value in determining how a child is learning.
NPR had a story this week about the alarming scarcity of new teachers coming into the workforce. Nobody who loves to teach, who values the opportunities available in a room full of inquisitive young brains is opting to become a public school teacher. And, why would they? I’m not sure what testing regimes like COMMON CORE think they are preparing students for but it is certainly not to be free thinking, thoughtful, creative and curious people. That is why admissions at independent schools is soaring and why more and more parents are choosing to home school their children. It’s an abomination of everything that good education should be.
Logical
I had to teach one of my math teachers how to program in BASIC so she could teach it. Back in the daring days of “home computing,” using a TRS-80, with a whopping 4k of memory.
HTML is worth learning. It is an extremely useful skill, and everyone should know their basic HTML by now: Bold, Italic, paragraph, break, link, image.
Of course, everyone should know many things.
Nowadays I don’t do much code, but knowing how it all works is helpful for helping others solve problems.
Truth tables, anyone?
Nice graphic
I learned code in the army.
Morse code, that is. Copied at speeds of 60+ gpm.
When I saw the headline and graphic…