Google Helps Girls Learn to Code

About 125 students from California's Ross Valley School District attended a "Made with Code" party at Google's Spear Street offices.

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(TNS) -- "A year ago I didn’t know how to code at all. I started teaching myself, and in a year I got a job at Google,” Janna Raley, who works with apps such as Gmail, told a group of Ross Valley School District girls at Google’s San Francisco office Wednesday.

About 125 students from Ross Valley’s White Hill Middle School and the district’s four elementary schools — Brookside, Hidden Valley, Manor and Wade Thomas — attended a Made with Code party at the search giant’s Spear Street offices. The initiative was launched by Google in 2014 to encourage girls to learn to code.

The evening’s activities included talks by women coders who work at Google, illustrations of how coding and computer science skills can help girls pursue their interests, and the main event, in which girls split into groups of two and did a coding project.

As the event began, the girls flooded into the Google office with its deck overlooking the Bay Bridge, the legendary multicolored Google logo on the wall and another critically important element of tech firms: Free food.

“We’re so excited to bring the girls this opportunity,” said White Hill Principal David Finnane as he helped the Googlers, as the company’s employees call themselves, hand out pizza to the ravenous hordes.

Katherine Overby, 12, of San Anselmo, said, “I use Google Chrome. That’s my browser of choice. I have an Android (phone) too. My everything is Google. I want to work here.”

According to a report from the Girl Scout Research Institute, 74 percent of girls express interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) in middle school. However, fewer than 1 percent of all female college freshmen intend to major in computer science.

Google is trying to address this through several different initiatives. The company has invested tens of millions of dollars since 2010 in organizations like Code.org, Black Girls Code, and Girls Who Code. The Made with Code initiative involves online activities and real-life events such as the Wednesday party.

Diane Britt, a Ross Valley parent who works as a sale account manager at Google, organized Wednesday’s event. She recruited her fellow Google employees, who donated their time as part of GoogleServe, a week in which employees do volunteer service.

As Hailey How, who works at Google Cloud Platform, opened the meeting, a hush fell over the crowd. Flashing an example of code up on the screen, she showed the girls how to assemble code in the proper order to make a cartoon character walk down a trail, then slide down a banister.

The commands were, “Walk one space,” “Walk on the trail,” and “Slide down the ramp.”

When she started with, “Slide down the ramp,” How asked the audience, “Will this work?”

The audience chorused, “No! It’s out of order!”

The girls then paired off and sat down to try doing the same coding exercise. Chloe Krashanoff and Sophia Pillitteri of White Hill jumped into chairs and set to work. After some help from a Googler, the two were able to duplicate the sequence.

Many of Made with Code’s projects use Blockly programming, a visual editor that writes programs by assembling individual blocks. Step-by-step instructions are provided to guide users. Along the way, works may either be discarded or saved and downloaded.

The terms “coding” and “computer programming” are often used interchangeably, though they are not universally accepted as synonyms.

“It was great,” said Courtney Mar, 12, a White Hill student. “It taught me how to command in sequence. I really liked it.”

©2016 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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