Khoury College hosts beginner coding workshop for local girls

It’s never too early to learn to code, says Laney Strange, Khoury College’s director of broadening participation and director for teaching faculty, who hosted a coding workshop for girls between the ages of 10 and 14 during the spring semester. According to Strange and her student volunteers, the event was designed to extend Khoury College’s computer science educational resources to local youth.

Using Scratch, a free visual programming language aimed at children ages 8 to 16, the girls were guided through the program to answer one question: What makes a leap year a leap year? With arithmetic and “if else” statements, the students used tiny characters to perform a series of commands based on the divisibility of random values by four.

Strange’s impetus to host the event stems from her transition from an all-female computer science environment at Simmons University to male-dominated classes during graduate school. Driven to pass forward the support and encouragement she received at Simmons, she began organizing workshops while teaching at Tufts University and has continued to do so at Northeastern.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I do sometimes run out of ideas,” Strange noted. “This is for ages 10 to 14, so that means I try to keep the actual typing a little bit low. Sometimes we do other interfaces. But I try not to have too much just typing. And then I will often try to tie it to a holiday.”

This year, with the workshop taking place on Leap Day, the room was filled with frog decorations and frog-themed Disney music as Strange and the volunteers assisted the girls with the evening’s preliminary activity: making frog origami. The activity concluded with a frog race, in which the victor earned a candy prize.

From there it was on to the coding portion of the workshop, where Strange and the student volunteers assisted the girls and encouraged them to explore their creativity through Scratch.

“I heard about this event from one of my friends,” said Samantha Chong, a second-year data science and biology combined major who assisted as a volunteer. “I thought it was a really cool way to introduce young kids to something they probably don’t have the opportunity to get involved in through their schools.”

The workshop ended with the girls demonstrating their newfound coding skills to their parents, receiving a congratulatory round of applause from the organizers, volunteers, and other relatives. Strange hopes to host similar events in the future to give more young students the opportunity to be exposed to coding languages.

“My goal for everybody is to get to the end of the day and say, ‘This is something I can do,’” Strange said. “They don’t have to eventually major in it or care about it, but if they don’t, I want it to be because they don’t like it and not because they don’t feel welcome.”