Made With Code

We started Made with Code because even though technology runs more and more of our lives, women aren't represented in the companies, labs, research, creative arts, design, organizations, and boardrooms that make technology happen. 

If girls are inspired to see that Computer Science can make the world more beautiful, more usable, more safe, more kind, more innovative, more healthy, and more funny then hopefully they will begin to contribute their essential voices. 

As parents, teachers, organizations, and companies we're making it our mission to creatively engage girls with code. Today, less than 1% of girls are interested in CS. Tomorrow, we can make that number go up.

Google launches ‘Made with Code’ initiative to encourage more girls to code, backed by $50m pledge

Google has announced that it will provide up to $50 million for organizations that can help encourage more girls to take an interest in computer science at an early age.

Revealed as part of its newly launched Made with Code initiative, the cash will be used for things like “rewarding teachers who support girls who take CS courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy,” Susan Wojcicki said in a blog post today.

Other aspects of the Made with Code scheme – which is also backed by other organizations like Girls Inc., Girl Scouts of the USA, MIT Media Lab and the National Center for Women & Information Technology, among others – include Blockly-based projects, like making a 3D printed bracelet, learning to create GIFs and “building beats” for a music track.

Google has put together a standalone site for the initiative too, so if you want to get involved you can head across there now.

➤ Things you love are Made with Code [Google]

Don’t miss: Codecademy, Google and DonorsChoose team up to get more girls studying Computer Science

Featured Image Credit – GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images

ORIGINAL: The Next Web

This New Girl-Powered Engineering Toy Asks Kids To Design And Wire Their Own Dollhouse

Designed by two Stanford engineers, Roominate is a toy that won't limit girls' imaginations. 

It's one of the few tools, gendered or not, that comes with electric circuits and few rules. 

Research increasingly shows that early childhood play shapes our skills, values, and modes of thinking as we grow older. 

Creators Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks met at Stanford because there were few other women.

“That was actually one of the first conversations we had. Why didn’t any of our other female friends do engineering?” Chen says. “And then we considered that it was the things that we played with while we were younger that really inspired us.”

More than a year after receiving nearly $86,000 through Kickstarter to build the initial product, Chen and Brooks are displaying Roominate at Manhattan’s annual Toy Fair this week.

The set, manufactured in China, comes with various shapes for walls, floors, and modular furniture.

It also comes with coated, AAA battery-powered circuits designed for six-year-old fingers to put together.

But little girls aren’t just building triple bunk beds and decorating doll house rooms with the Roominate set.

When I visit Roominate’s creators at their Toy Fair booth, Chen and Brooks are standing behind a model of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge.

It’s one modeled off of an 11-year-old’s design that originally featured pipe cleaners as suspension cables, and took half an hour for Chen and Brooks to recreate, they say.

They’ve also seen test groups manufacture everything from amusement park rides with the spinning circuit motors to the Great Wall of China.

With Roominate's pastel-colored Lincoln Logs for the 21st century, little girls are inspired build what's in their imaginations and learn electrical circuitry, too.

In many ways, little girls growing up in the United States today will have more freedom to determine their futures than ever. So why are they still aggressively marketed the same plastic pooping babies, Pepto-pink ponies, and anatomically outrageous dolls from 50 years ago?

Research increasingly shows that early childhood play shapes our skills, values, and modes of thinking as we grow older. But while products like GoldieBlox have started to deconstruct the age-old assumption that little girls simply don’t like building things, choices are still limited.

Now Roominate, a new toy designed by female Stanford University engineering grads, offers another alternative: the first wired dollhouse that kids build on their own. It's one of the few tools, gendered or not, that comes with electric circuits and few rules.

Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks, engineering graduates from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively, met within their first few days of master's programs at Stanford University, they say, because there weren’t many other girls. “That was actually one of the first conversations we had. Why didn’t any of our other female friends do engineering?” Chen says. “And then we considered that it was the things that we played with while we were younger that really inspired us.”

For Brooks, the building bug set in when she first asked her father if Santa Claus might bring her some Barbies for Christmas. He was appalled at the idea, and gave his then-eight-year-old daughter a miniature saw instead. “He sent me off into the basement, and I was making dolls, and dinosaurs, and doll houses,” she remembers. “The act of figuring it out, realizing when I made a mistake and how I could go around it, that’s what really got me into engineering.”

More than a year after receiving nearly $86,000 through Kickstarter to build the initial product, Chen and Brooks are displaying Roominate at Manhattan’s annual Toy Fair this week. The set, manufactured in China, comes with various shapes for walls, floors, modular furniture, as well as coated, AAA battery-powered circuits designed for six-year-old fingers to put together.

 

But little girls aren’t just building triple bunk beds and decorating doll house rooms with the Roominate set. When I visit Roominate’s creators at their Toy Fair booth, Chen and Brooks are standing behind a model of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. It’s one modeled off of an 11-year-old’s design that originally featured pipe cleaners as suspension cables, and took half an hour for Chen and Brooks to recreate, they say. They’ve also seen test groups manufacture everything from amusement park rides with the spinning circuit motors to the Great Wall of China.

Still, while Chen and Brooks claim that their toy might be less “pinkified” than, say, GoldieBlox, the toy does have some trappings of stereotypical little girl-ness--pastels, two dolls, and two big-eyed pets. Parents, however, are reporting that little boys are using Roominate, too. That’s part of the reason why Chen and Brooks are also looking to expand into gender-who-cares-territory.

“We started this for girls, because it’s a problem we lived, that we continue to live. We want to get more females in the [science, technology, engineering, and math] field,” Brooks says. “That’s why we started it, because we want to make this hands-on, creative, open-ended play. But as we’ve been developing it, we’ve been realizing that that kind of play is really missing for boys, too.”

ORIGINAL: FasCo Exist

Disrupting the Pink Aisle

Toys for future innovators

Star Spinner Nacho Spinner The Launcher Double Dipper Spinning Top Stack of Wheels

Toys for future innovators
At GoldieBlox, our goal is to get girls building. We’re here to help level the playing field in every sense of the phrase. By tapping into girls' strong verbal skills, our story + construction set bolsters confidence in spatial skills while giving young inventors the tools they need to build and create amazing things.

In a world where men largely outnumber women in science, technology, engineering and math...and girls lose interest in these subjects as early as age 8, GoldieBlox is determined to change the equation. Construction toys develop an early interest in these subjects, but for over a hundred years, they've been considered "boys' toys". By designing a construction toy from the female perspective, we aim to disrupt the pink aisle and inspire the future generation of female engineers.

We believe there are a million girls out there who are engineers. They just might not know it yet. We think GoldieBlox can show them the way.

Meet our inventor and CEO, Debbie Sterling

Debbie Sterling is the founder and CEO of GoldieBlox. Growing up in a small town in Rhode Island, she never knew what engineering was until her high school math teacher suggested she pursue it as a college major. She couldn't figure out why her math teacher thought she should be a train conductor! Nevertheless, she gave engineering a try during her freshman year at Stanford. Four years later, she graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering / Product Design. Bothered by how few women there were in her program, Debbie became obsessed with the notion of "disrupting the pink aisle" with a toy that would introduce girls to the joy of engineering at a young age. 

ORIGINAL: GoldieBlox

Girls Outpace Boys Mostly Due to Classroom Behavior

ORIGINAL: Education News

Education experts have long been asking themselves why girls often receive better grades than boys, especially in kindergarten and elementary schools — and a new study offers an answer to the question. After looking at data for nearly 5,800 students, researchers have concluded that a large portion of the grade gap could be attributed to [...]

Education experts have long been asking themselves why girls often receive better grades than boys, especially in kindergarten and elementary schools — and a new study offers an answer to the question.

After looking at data for nearly 5,800 students, researchers have concluded that a large portion of the grade gap could be attributed to differences in behavior. In short, when it comes to report card time, girls are being rewarded less for their knowledge and more for how quietly they can sit and pay attention in class.

The academic gender gap has been a growing concern in Britain, where girls are already outperforming their male peers in academics by the time they reach primary schools with the gap growing all through students’ academic careers. According to Graeme Paton, the Education Editor for The Daily Telegraph, nearly two-thirds of female students gained five decent GCSE grades last year, while only slightly more than half of male students did likewise.

The gap is now becoming evident even in subjects that have been traditionally dominated by boys – like math and science. The above statistic holds for GCSEs in those subjects as well.

Girls are now more likely to go on to university and graduate with a first-class honours degree, it was revealed.

Prof Christopher Cornwell, of the University of Georgia, who led the study, said: “The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as ‘approaches toward learning’.

“You can think of ‘approaches to learning’ as a rough measure of what a child’s attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child’s 

• attentiveness, 
• task persistence, 
• eagerness to learn, 
• learning independence, 
• flexibility and 
• organisation.

The study followed students from first grade through to the sixth, and researchers found that even early on boys began to receive overall grades that were at odds with their actual level of achievement. Boys who were able to meet the behavior standard set by their female classmates didn’t have the same grade-achievement disparity in their overall marks.

To derive their conclusions, Cornwell and her co-authors looked at raw grading data in all subject areas, including reading mathematics and science, and compared it to how teachers assessed student performance.

Prof Cornwell said: “The trajectory at which kids move through school is often influenced by a teacher’s assessment of their performance.

“This affects their ability to enter into advanced classes and other kinds of academic opportunities, even post-secondary opportunities.