Mission

Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology. Our programs educate, equip, and inspire girls with the computing skills they’ll need to pursue 21st century opportunities. Our Clubs Program is free and open to 6th to 12th graders. Girls learn to use computer science to impact their community and join our sisterhood of supportive peers and role models.

If you don't know how to code, we'll teach you. If you do know how to code, we'll teach you to code better.

GWC is a program for everyone — anybody can learn to code.

Goals

Our club works towards the following three goals:

  • Help girls build identities as computer scientists by highlighting and discussing female role models and their work through Women in Tech Spotlights.

  • Give girls practice with computational concepts through lessons and practice and by creating a CS Impact Project through a design-build-test cycle.

  • Build sisterhood by connecting girls to one another and to a national community of female coders.

Schedule

Saturdays 10am-noon, January 21 - April 15, with the exception of March 4, 11 and 25 (no meetings on these three Saturdays), for a total of 10 meetings.

Any changes to scheduled dates (e.g., cancellation due to illness) are posted to the news by 8:00 am the morning of the change.

Meetings start promptly at 10:00 am. Coders should be in the classroom or signed into Zoom by then. Late comers may find themselves falling behind.

Zoom link and passcode for each meeting of the virtual clubs will be sent via email on the Friday before to the address(es) provided at registration.

Attendance

National GWC mandates that coders attend at least 80% of club meetings. Please notify info@spartangwc.org in advance of absences whenever possible.

Anatomy of a Meeting

Clubs meet for two hours each week for 10 weeks. The structure of a meeting varies over time:

  • Most meetings start with a spotlight on Women in Tech and continue with a short coding tutorial.

  • At the start of a 10-week session, coders work at their own pace through lessons and coding challenges on CodeHS.

  • Around the 5th week, most coders have completed a handful of lessons and their focus shifts to collaboratively defining and building a CS Impact Project. They work in small teams to design, code, and test independent projects that go into our club gallery.

  • Towards the end of each meeting, coders share what they have accomplished, what they plan to work on next time, and what they need help with in a GWC Standup activity.

  • We try to save 10 minutes at the end of each meeting in which to kick back, socialize, play video games, or write in individual reflection journals.