It is important to harness the abilities of a young kid by showing them that STEM can be a fun place.
This past semester I spent my Friday evenings teaching young girls how to code. I taught them about the power of conditional statements and circuits. As I looked at my group of girls, I saw curiosity on their faces, brilliant minds, and empathetic souls… who sometimes instead of building their robots, used the LEGO® bricks to build bracelets and necklaces for themselves.
While I know this passion exists inside of them, the statistics show that the majority will not go into STEM fields. Only 31% of STEM students are women. The gender gap is especially high in the computer science and engineering fields with this statistic decreasing even more to 23% and 21%, respectively.
As a computer science major, every day I see and experience this stark gender gap. Not only do I feel underrepresented when I look at my peers in my classes, but after over two years in the program I have yet to have a computer science course taught by a female professor.
My everyday experience is why I am so passionate about encouraging more young people of all backgrounds to give STEM fields a shot.
I have been in many classrooms leading presentations and activities to inspire and show the potential of pursuing a career in a STEM field. While some are amazed and intrigued to try out coding, I often have conversations like the following, too:
“I just don’t get this.”
“Hmm okay, do you want to show me what part you don’t get? I can maybe help you understand that bit of code.”
“This is too hard!”
“I know it’s not as easy as some of the examples we did as a group, but they are similar! It may seem impossible but let’s sit with the question for a little longer and maybe we will see it’s not as hard as it may initially seem.”
“This is in a language I don’t even know”
“Yeah, computer languages are kinda weird. The point of them is just so humans can communicate with the computer. I like to think about it as learning English or French to communicate with your family and friends.”
“I JUST CAN’T DO THIS!”
As a computer science major, I am saying this: coding is hard. But if there is anything that I have learned, it’s that even hard things are not impossible. If you don’t understand something and feel like you can’t do it, that doesn’t mean you aren’t smart. It might take some time and resources, but you can achieve anything you put your mind to!
When I reflect on my journey, I am amazed that I even ended up in this field! I had never taken a computer science course before university. The first time I did any coding was in Jeff Long’s CMPT 141 with a simple print “Hello World” statement.
My reflections take me back to Grade 4. It was then that I learned about the existence of fractions, division, and negative numbers. I remember singing multiplication times-table songs and using yellow and red squares to do calculations with negative numbers. Throughout it all, I was always told that I was good at math. My teacher said I could do it. My parents said I could do it. So, I believed I could do it.
As someone who enjoys baking, fractions just made sense. I use them all the time to measure butter, sugar, and flour when creating cinnamon buns or my favourite chocolate chip cookies. I give all the credit for my understanding of the complexities of derivatives and the Krebs cycle to my amazing high school teachers, whose notes and teaching style made me easily grasp these concepts.
They all taught in a way that made those subjects fun! My fondest memories of my earlier education include building cars for my physics class using toilet paper rolls and elastic bands and being amazed by a classmate’s creativity in creating the evolution timeline taught in biology using just LEGO bricks.
I would not have pursued a degree in STEM if I had not had people, including myself, believe that I could do it. I would not have even opened the engineering pamphlets that USask handed out during orientation if I had not gotten the courage to overcome tough topics in math like fractions in Grade 4. I would not have contemplated a career in the field if I didn’t think that STEM was fun.
If I wasn’t encouraged or shown how fun these fields are as a kid then I would have not pursued the opportunities that I did throughout my elementary and secondary education which opened my doors to exploring these specializations further as an adult.
It is through this experience of leading Girls Coding every Friday that I have come to learn that the most important part is not actually making sure that kids can execute perfectly a while-loop or know exactly what a string data type is. Instead, it is showing them that they are capable of doing whatever they put their minds to. And that, most importantly, STEM fields can be a space that is fun, cool, and interesting!