Approaches to Diversifying the Programmer Community - The Case of the Girls Coding Day

Huilian Sophie Qiu, Yang Wen, Alexander Nolte

Abstract: In this paper, we present Girls Coding Day, a one-day workshop designed to bring in young female adults who did not study computer science at college but wished to try out or learn computer programming. To study the effectiveness of the workshop on participants' future intention on learning programming and perceived coding ability, we conducted 2 separate surveys of participants of 32 Girls Coding Day events that happened between 2017 and 2019. Our contributions include participants' motivations; components in our workshop design that correlate with participants' learning outcomes; and implications for designs of similar events in the future.