From Nigeria to Kenya, TechInPink bridges digital divide - Vanguard News

vanguardngr.com - AT face value, Yetunde Sanni and Gertrude Nyenyeshi have nothing in common. Sanni is from Nigeria, Nyeyenshi from Kenya. They haven’t even met in person. At a deeper level however, their love for technology unites them. Both ladies founded, and now run TechInPink, an organisation that teaches women and girls coding and software development regardless of their background. According to Sanni, who is also a full time stack developer at Andela: “We started with blogging which involves teaching other people the craft of software development, we decided to do this because we found out we have very few tech based blogs that are run by women and we took the challenge upon ourselves to transform the false that women can’t write great code tutorials.”

Although the organisation is barely a year old, success stories abound from the ‘pink techies’ efforts. There are two students that readily come to mind when we’re asked about our success stories,” said Nyenyeshi, a full stack Javascript developer.

“One is Salma, an Architecture student in Kenya, and the other is Ruth a paramedical student in Nigeria who we mentored last year. They both had no prior experience but their transformation has been tremendous. We’d also list the two events that we held in both locations a success story as the ladies were introduced and taught about programming and it makes us smile to see some of them actively pursuing opportunities to learn more.”

Supermodel Karlie Kloss chats with us about the launch of Kode With Klossy, a coding camp for girls

techcrunch.com - Karlie Kloss made headlines last year when she announced she was not only a high-ranking model but could also code in Ruby.

Kloss, who says she’s always been interested in math and science, started learning to program a couple of years ago.

The supermodel partnered with the Flatiron School in New York City last year to launch #KodewithKarlie, a scholarship program for teen girls.

The supermodel is now starting Kode With Klossy, a coding summer camp for girls ages 13-18. The two-week camp will provide scholarships to 80 young women from New York, Los Angeles and Karlie’s hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.

Kloss chatted with me recently about why she decided to pick up the coding trade, how that plays out in her supermodel world and why she decided to launch a camp for young women interested in programming.

TC: You’re a supermodel with an ultra-successful career in the fashion industry. Why learn to code? What’s the story behind wanting to do that?

KK: I grew up in St. Louis and didn’t really know anything about fashion until I walked in a charity fashion show at my local mall and was signed to a modeling agency. Before my modeling career took off, I really loved my math and science classes in school. My dad was an ER doctor and as a girl, I dreamed of following in his footsteps. Taking coding classes brings me back to the excitement I felt as a kid in first-period biology. I’m a curious person and coding allows me to think about how our world is built.

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Featured Act: Empowering girls with tech and science in Ghana

The Melton Foundation is a network of citizens around the world that promotes global citizenship to address issues around the world, as well as to encourage individuals and organizations to reach across boundaries and work together. Last month they started featuring philanthropic efforts in their 100 Acts of Global Citizenship  program. The first Featured Act is the work of Melton Fellow Vladimir Fomene, who encourages young students--especially girls--to learn coding and computer science starting at an early age.

meltonfoundation.org - This post is the first Featured Act from our 100 Acts of Global Citizenship program. To discover more acts, visit our campaign page!

Vladimir Fomene, a Melton Fellow from Cameroon, studies computer science at Ashesi University. When he started thinking about his Act of Global Citizenship, Vladimir wanted to address a social cause in his own field of study. That's how he came up with the idea to empower young people, especially girls, with technology skills.

"When I started coding, I realized that things would have been easier if I had started when I was very young," Vladimir said. "I thought it would give people more opportunities if they start coding at a very early age."

Vladimir organized a workshop for junior high students at Christ the King International College in Accra which included teamwork activities, a graphic design session and scratch programming session. Although the session was open for both boys and girls, Vladimir especially encouraged the girls to participate actively.

"In STEM fields, there is a gender balance problem because they are dominated by men," Vladimir says. "Many more girls are interested in going for technology fields, but they are not introduced to these things early on."

Read more here.

8 ways you can empower girls to learn coding

Make sure to check out this article, excerpted below, by Matt Petronzio of Mashable about how to invest in girls by empowering them to learn coding—the language of the future—so they will be part of a revolution in STEM careers. Petronzio discusses the progress we've made so far, hurdles we must still overcome, what the average person can do and much more. We've included just the first below. See the full article for the other seven points as well as statistics, inspiration and ideas about what you can do to help encourage and empower some of our brightest girls.

1. Know the specific barriers we need to overcome.

Before anything, you need to understand the systemic obstacles preventing girls from getting into coding. Both a culture that persistently ignores and discourages girls' abilities in computer science, and the lack of access to tools and education, play influential roles.

Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, says it's deeply ingrained in our culture to let it be OK for girls to say they don't like math and science.

"We almost sensationalize it in culture for girls to promote that," she tells Mashable. "You can walk into a Forever 21 and buy a T-shirt that says 'I'm allergic to algebra' ... You're always showcasing these really smart girls hiding their intelligence when it comes to math and science."

If girls can't see themselves in these professions, Saujani adds, they're not going to choose to pursue them. And that also extends to inside classrooms, where coding is rarely offered to students in general, much less focusing on girls — an obstacle Code.org founder and CEO Hadi Partovi says is equally as significant as culture.

"If you enter a classroom and you see 18 boys and two girls, you automatically think, 'I'm in the wrong place and I'm not welcome,'" Partovi says. "And that makes it harder."

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eJYW4ew5eg[/embed]

Read the rest of the article here. Also check out CodeGirl, a documentary from award-winning filmmaker Lesley Chilcott that follows teams from the thousands of girls around the world taking part in the Global Technovation Challenge by building apps that help their communities.