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I have opinions™, but mostly agree with this article. Most intro coding classes and course materials read more like a glossary than a lesson. This contributes (

I have opinions™, but mostly agree with this article. Most intro coding classes and course materials read more like a glossary than a lesson. This contributes (rather directly) to the failure to retain a diverse student base in intro CS program. We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly[1]. Studies in math education have shown that the way material is presented/courses are run has a huge impact on reducing disparities[2]. This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course. While I was at the University of Michigan, I helped a professor develop "Joy of Coding," a mini-course for high school students that focuses on sparking desire ("joy") rather than teaching CS first principles[3]. By the end of the first lesson, students are manipulating images with code – a real "WOW!" moment. It's built on Pathbird, a platform that I built (in conjunction with UMich faculty) to run more engaging and accessible courses in computer science and computational subjects. (Shameless plug: if you're interested in Pathbird, or even just to chat, drop me a line at travis@pathbird.com). [1] https://cse-climate.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2020/07/ay2019-2020.pdf https://cse-climate.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites... (see page 8) [2] https://www.colorado.edu/eer/sites/default/files/attached-files/twopagerjun18_0.pdf https://www.colorado.edu/eer/sites/default/files/attached-fi... [3] https://continuum.engin.umich.edu/programs/jumpstart-coding/ https://continuum.engin.umich.edu/programs/jumpstart-coding/

freebreakfast 5y ago
Do you know of any comparative studies with other countries? Or is this a predominately US/Canada issue? For example, do BIPOC students in Botswana drop out at similar rates? Do non-BIPOC students in Taiwan experience similar drop out rates? What are the classes and course materials like in these countries in comparison to the US/Canada? What about drop out numbers from international students? For example, do Polish women studying CS at American universities drop out at the same rate as American women? For those who do drop out, do they drop out for the same reasons? If we want to get to the root of the problem we need both more breadth and more depth in our understanding. Too often we stop at the men/women (in America) or BIPOC/non-BIPOC (in America) divides, and then provide generalized solutions which have very limit impact.
- another_story 5y ago
  I can speak as someone who has taught CS in high school in a few different East Asian countries, including Taiwan. The bias exists, but is less pronounced than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Boys will make remarks, but if you nip it quickly at the start then it's generally ok. I teach all four years in high school and each year I get more females rolling up. My recent graduating classes have had more females, but still only 20% or so, but my entry level classes now are 50/50. Oddly, every female I've had who takes the higher level CS classes has graduated with the highest mark you can get on the exit exams. They routinely destroy the boys on any test and with regard to programming skills. Sadly, some of those who take it at the lower level are pushed by their parents to take other classes at higher levels in preparation for university admission. Parents sometimes carry that bias that females should not be engineers.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  There's some work on it. One might start at the keyphrase "Gender-equality paradox".
skinkestek 5y ago
> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. Just be aware that this is not everyones experience. Many places boys are held back and girls are pushed forward. And then afterwards boys gets told they are somehow "privileged" and would never be were they are if it wasn't for "male privilege". Obviously this goes both ways, but there is at least some focus on it when it hurts girls. If you try to mention the problems young innocent boys have, be prepared to get laughed out. (I'm halfway expecting that even on HN too.)
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  This seems entirely created out of thin air.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    I think that was neither nice nor fair from you. This is experience. If you had a cushy life, good for you. But don't tell others their experiences aren't real.
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      Ok, I'll bite. Citation? Any evidence of any kind to offer? See, that post just read like negative chatter. "Folks are always doing wrong stuff." Meaningless to offer without anything concrete.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        This is a pseudonymous account and I am not willing to change that. I will try without giving anything away, but you will need to help me here: - Do you really think some people here haven't grown up with feminist teachers who took it way too far? - How many times have you heard anything about "Girls who code" vs "Boys who code"? - If you are actually interested and ready to see something ugly, just go back and try to read some "mens day" discussion on Twitter or I think even on HN too. I've tried to be active in those days in a positive way. Last year I gave up. Any mention of today being mens day on company chat is immediately laughed off with something along the lines of "and so is 363 other days". Meanwhile men die younger, have higher incarceration rates, more suicides, and gets less education. And also the few times there is discussion it is often redirected to "how men are suffering from toxic masculinity" which is probably true but only a small problem.
tonguez 5y ago
Yes, I remember back in the day the girls would always try to come into the computer lab to play video games. My friends and I were always like, "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!" Then they left. The girls wanted to learn how to code so badly, but we wouldn't let them. My friends and I were getting lots of sexual attention from women, but we thought that was boring, and preferred to spend our time alone on computers. The girls were having sex, but they thought it was boring, and wanted to learn to code instead, but my friends and I physically prevented them from entering the computer lab, using our strong muscles. My friends and I all had zero sex drive, and if we had any attention from the opposite sex we would have rejected it and continued to spend all our time on computers.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Is this GPT-3? It looks like it is.
  - exolymph 5y ago
    It's a parody of the ridiculous notion that geeky men try to keep women out of their hobbies. Reality is that geeky men are practically gagging for women to share their interests.
    - IX-103 5y ago
      It's well documented that the behavior of geeky men discourages women who are interested in such hobbies and fields, so I'm not sure that it is entirely ridiculous for some people to assume that is intentional. I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.
- 5y ago
908B64B197 5y ago
> We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly Are you really better at it if you can’t retain them in the long run? The stats you shared are interesting, but to me it seems to highlight that students are getting “weeded out” at the beginning of the course. I would be curious to attempt a correlation with High school GPA and SAT scores. Because, if lower performing students leave, regardless of gender or race, that’s to be expected. But if overachieving students of color leave and their (white or asian) peers with lower grades don’t, now that’s an interesting issue. > Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course. I would argue the solution here is to have different “levels” of intro courses. Because the converse is also true; students that are coming in with a decade of coding and who already had an introduction to programming might assume they will be able to “coast out” courses and then suddenly realize they are falling behind their peers. And then drop out.
kuboble 5y ago
> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. It's not my experience. When I was a kid CS/IT didn't exist where I lived. I was a math geek who loved to occupy himself with solving problems which are useless in real life and I was actively discouraged from it by parents, teachers and even bullied by peers. I still liked it but I tried not to speak about with anyone except some closest friends who accepted my weirdness. From my perspective it seemed that compared to boys the girls need more acceptance are less likely to pursue something they like if they are actively discouraged from it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
foxfluff 5y ago
Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. It mostly involved adding graphics and a few methods & some properties to objects (which already had physics etc. implemented) in an otherwise more or less done project base. I don't know about retaining or intimidation but I feel like it was way too much "just fill in the gaps, look you have a character on the screen now" and that they really failed to teach the basics of programming and I got the vibe that students finished the course not really having any clue how the whole thing works at all. The next course was object oriented programming at the deep end. I feel like she's still struggling with the basics and doesn't have much self confidence at all. And she's not dumb.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  > Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. I had exactly the same exercise on my first day on uni, we had to take some robot maze pathfinder game and adjust the algorithm a bit. As someone who had been writing code for over a decade at that point (but who was unfamiliar with Java), I still remember it was intimidating. I cannot imagine how it must have felt for people without prior coding experience.
  - void-pointer 5y ago
    Warwick? :) In hindsight, the quality of teaching actual coding at my uni was pretty poor. But coding in general is pretty hard to teach well in that setting.
imglorp 5y ago
This comment covered several hot topics. 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens. 2. CS is part coding, part science of algorithms, and part software engineering. We have to quit intertwingling all terms into the catchall "CS" bucket because sometimes "how to run excel" gets thrown in there too. Maybe best to drop the term altogether and use more descriptive names for each study.
- travisd 5y ago
  RE: 2: I think I agree. There are lots of "CS" programs targeted towards high-school students which I have mixed feelings about. The goal shouldn't be to turn every student that walks through the door into a SWE (there's somewhat of a conflict of interest here considering most programs are sponsored by big tech companies who are desperate for talent – Microsoft does a lot in this space). Instead, I think it should serve a few roles: expose students to new opportunities (learn if you do want to be a SWE); give students the skills to understand that computers and algorithms are not magic (important from a public awareness perspective); and also to teach enough "deep" technical skills to prepare them for a world dominated by software (e.g., learning how to query databases, write small automations, etc.). But I think most important is that intro courses need to serve as jumping off points (i.e., they should be INTRO courses). Give students a taste and let them decide if they like it and want to take another bite.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens. Girls in STEM =/= Girls becoming professional programmers. There are plenty of girls in STEM fields such as medicine, biology, geology, physics, Math, civil engineering... The fact that not a lot of them want to be forced to sit before a computer 10 hours a day for the rest of their lives certainly isn't an issue if you asks me...
  - 5y ago

freebreakfast 5y ago

Do you know of any comparative studies with other countries? Or is this a predominately US/Canada issue? For example, do BIPOC students in Botswana drop out at similar rates? Do non-BIPOC students in Taiwan experience similar drop out rates? What are the classes and course materials like in these countries in comparison to the US/Canada? What about drop out numbers from international students? For example, do Polish women studying CS at American universities drop out at the same rate as American women? For those who do drop out, do they drop out for the same reasons? If we want to get to the root of the problem we need both more breadth and more depth in our understanding. Too often we stop at the men/women (in America) or BIPOC/non-BIPOC (in America) divides, and then provide generalized solutions which have very limit impact.

another_story 5y ago
I can speak as someone who has taught CS in high school in a few different East Asian countries, including Taiwan. The bias exists, but is less pronounced than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Boys will make remarks, but if you nip it quickly at the start then it's generally ok. I teach all four years in high school and each year I get more females rolling up. My recent graduating classes have had more females, but still only 20% or so, but my entry level classes now are 50/50. Oddly, every female I've had who takes the higher level CS classes has graduated with the highest mark you can get on the exit exams. They routinely destroy the boys on any test and with regard to programming skills. Sadly, some of those who take it at the lower level are pushed by their parents to take other classes at higher levels in preparation for university admission. Parents sometimes carry that bias that females should not be engineers.
renewiltord 5y ago
There's some work on it. One might start at the keyphrase "Gender-equality paradox".

skinkestek 5y ago

> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. Just be aware that this is not everyones experience. Many places boys are held back and girls are pushed forward. And then afterwards boys gets told they are somehow "privileged" and would never be were they are if it wasn't for "male privilege". Obviously this goes both ways, but there is at least some focus on it when it hurts girls. If you try to mention the problems young innocent boys have, be prepared to get laughed out. (I'm halfway expecting that even on HN too.)

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
This seems entirely created out of thin air.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  I think that was neither nice nor fair from you. This is experience. If you had a cushy life, good for you. But don't tell others their experiences aren't real.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. Citation? Any evidence of any kind to offer? See, that post just read like negative chatter. "Folks are always doing wrong stuff." Meaningless to offer without anything concrete.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      This is a pseudonymous account and I am not willing to change that. I will try without giving anything away, but you will need to help me here: - Do you really think some people here haven't grown up with feminist teachers who took it way too far? - How many times have you heard anything about "Girls who code" vs "Boys who code"? - If you are actually interested and ready to see something ugly, just go back and try to read some "mens day" discussion on Twitter or I think even on HN too. I've tried to be active in those days in a positive way. Last year I gave up. Any mention of today being mens day on company chat is immediately laughed off with something along the lines of "and so is 363 other days". Meanwhile men die younger, have higher incarceration rates, more suicides, and gets less education. And also the few times there is discussion it is often redirected to "how men are suffering from toxic masculinity" which is probably true but only a small problem.

tonguez 5y ago

Yes, I remember back in the day the girls would always try to come into the computer lab to play video games. My friends and I were always like, "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!" Then they left. The girls wanted to learn how to code so badly, but we wouldn't let them. My friends and I were getting lots of sexual attention from women, but we thought that was boring, and preferred to spend our time alone on computers. The girls were having sex, but they thought it was boring, and wanted to learn to code instead, but my friends and I physically prevented them from entering the computer lab, using our strong muscles. My friends and I all had zero sex drive, and if we had any attention from the opposite sex we would have rejected it and continued to spend all our time on computers.

Der_Einzige 5y ago
Is this GPT-3? It looks like it is.
- exolymph 5y ago
  It's a parody of the ridiculous notion that geeky men try to keep women out of their hobbies. Reality is that geeky men are practically gagging for women to share their interests.
  - IX-103 5y ago
    It's well documented that the behavior of geeky men discourages women who are interested in such hobbies and fields, so I'm not sure that it is entirely ridiculous for some people to assume that is intentional. I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.
5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

> We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly Are you really better at it if you can’t retain them in the long run? The stats you shared are interesting, but to me it seems to highlight that students are getting “weeded out” at the beginning of the course. I would be curious to attempt a correlation with High school GPA and SAT scores. Because, if lower performing students leave, regardless of gender or race, that’s to be expected. But if overachieving students of color leave and their (white or asian) peers with lower grades don’t, now that’s an interesting issue. > Students arrive in intro CS courses, are sat next to students who have been coding since they were 10, and are rightfully intimidated even though they could succeed in the course. I would argue the solution here is to have different “levels” of intro courses. Because the converse is also true; students that are coming in with a decade of coding and who already had an introduction to programming might assume they will be able to “coast out” courses and then suddenly realize they are falling behind their peers. And then drop out.

kuboble 5y ago

> This is especially important in CS especially when boys are encouraged from a young age to do "techy" and "geeky" things in ways that girls usually aren't. It's not my experience. When I was a kid CS/IT didn't exist where I lived. I was a math geek who loved to occupy himself with solving problems which are useless in real life and I was actively discouraged from it by parents, teachers and even bullied by peers. I still liked it but I tried not to speak about with anyone except some closest friends who accepted my weirdness. From my perspective it seemed that compared to boys the girls need more acceptance are less likely to pursue something they like if they are actively discouraged from it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

foxfluff 5y ago

Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. It mostly involved adding graphics and a few methods & some properties to objects (which already had physics etc. implemented) in an otherwise more or less done project base. I don't know about retaining or intimidation but I feel like it was way too much "just fill in the gaps, look you have a character on the screen now" and that they really failed to teach the basics of programming and I got the vibe that students finished the course not really having any clue how the whole thing works at all. The next course was object oriented programming at the deep end. I feel like she's still struggling with the basics and doesn't have much self confidence at all. And she's not dumb.

stingraycharles 5y ago
> Meanwhile my sister's first programming course at university involved making a game using an existing bespoke framework. I had exactly the same exercise on my first day on uni, we had to take some robot maze pathfinder game and adjust the algorithm a bit. As someone who had been writing code for over a decade at that point (but who was unfamiliar with Java), I still remember it was intimidating. I cannot imagine how it must have felt for people without prior coding experience.
- void-pointer 5y ago
  Warwick? :) In hindsight, the quality of teaching actual coding at my uni was pretty poor. But coding in general is pretty hard to teach well in that setting.

imglorp 5y ago

This comment covered several hot topics. 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens. 2. CS is part coding, part science of algorithms, and part software engineering. We have to quit intertwingling all terms into the catchall "CS" bucket because sometimes "how to run excel" gets thrown in there too. Maybe best to drop the term altogether and use more descriptive names for each study.

travisd 5y ago
RE: 2: I think I agree. There are lots of "CS" programs targeted towards high-school students which I have mixed feelings about. The goal shouldn't be to turn every student that walks through the door into a SWE (there's somewhat of a conflict of interest here considering most programs are sponsored by big tech companies who are desperate for talent – Microsoft does a lot in this space). Instead, I think it should serve a few roles: expose students to new opportunities (learn if you do want to be a SWE); give students the skills to understand that computers and algorithms are not magic (important from a public awareness perspective); and also to teach enough "deep" technical skills to prepare them for a world dominated by software (e.g., learning how to query databases, write small automations, etc.). But I think most important is that intro courses need to serve as jumping off points (i.e., they should be INTRO courses). Give students a taste and let them decide if they like it and want to take another bite.
throw_m239339 5y ago
> 1. Girls in STEM: society needs to quit telling people "math is hard, tee hee" and quit shopping in the Pink Aisle at the toy store and reinforcing that culture. Buy your kids Lego and Raspberry Pi circuit kits and see what happens. Girls in STEM =/= Girls becoming professional programmers. There are plenty of girls in STEM fields such as medicine, biology, geology, physics, Math, civil engineering... The fact that not a lot of them want to be forced to sit before a computer 10 hours a day for the rest of their lives certainly isn't an issue if you asks me...
- 5y ago