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I am particularly interested in nailing this discussion down. I have two teen aged daughters. They attend a super-competitive public high school. Students are a

I am particularly interested in nailing this discussion down. I have two teen aged daughters. They attend a super-competitive public high school. Students are actually shunned if they are not academic. The peer pressure to excel in math and science is really surprising. One daughter is known as 'nerd goddess' and wears that nickname as a badge of honor. She plans on becoming an English teacher. The other is the one to beat in her honors geometry class. She wants to study business in college. They both participated in 'Hour of Code' last week. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/apple-microsoft-obama-urge-kids-to-spend-an-hour-coding-this-week/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/apple-... I silently hoped that at least one of them would come home and say, 'Hey, dad, this coding thing you've been doing your whole career is pretty cool. Let's write an app!' What I got was 'meh' and more 'meh'. So am I supposed to chide them that if they don't get on the compiler they are going to miss their chance to found a YC startup? Really?

kirtijthorat 13y ago
You may want to look at the "Hackbright Academy" which runs a quarterly engineering fellowship in San Francisco. This is a 12-week accelerated software development program designed to help women become awesome programmers - See more at: http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ I also recommend reading the following two sites: http://gracehopper.org/ http://gracehopper.org/ and http://www.girlswhocode.com/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/
- 11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
  Thanks, but you may have missed my point. They have known of my profession their whole lives. I talk to them about what I do all the time. And they are under a great deal of peer pressure at school to go into science the same way that I did. Parents and friends are the most influential people for teens, yet they have no interest. And I don't think it is proper parenting for me to push them into something they have no interest in.
  - merrua 13y ago
    Thats fair that you do not want to push them. However if she likes english teaching. Maybe she would be interesting in the problems of lingustics computing or educational computing. Half the time people learn to program to do stuff with it. They can learn regex expressions to search through 1,000,000 lines of primary sources for several different spellings of a word, or they can sit back and think of a different way to teach a classroom of kids maths. If she likes english, find out why english teachers are learning programming (cos they are) or which area she is interested in and what tools they are using.

kirtijthorat 13y ago

You may want to look at the "Hackbright Academy" which runs a quarterly engineering fellowship in San Francisco. This is a 12-week accelerated software development program designed to help women become awesome programmers - See more at: http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/ I also recommend reading the following two sites: http://gracehopper.org/ http://gracehopper.org/ and http://www.girlswhocode.com/ http://www.girlswhocode.com/

11thEarlOfMar 13y ago
Thanks, but you may have missed my point. They have known of my profession their whole lives. I talk to them about what I do all the time. And they are under a great deal of peer pressure at school to go into science the same way that I did. Parents and friends are the most influential people for teens, yet they have no interest. And I don't think it is proper parenting for me to push them into something they have no interest in.
- merrua 13y ago
  Thats fair that you do not want to push them. However if she likes english teaching. Maybe she would be interesting in the problems of lingustics computing or educational computing. Half the time people learn to program to do stuff with it. They can learn regex expressions to search through 1,000,000 lines of primary sources for several different spellings of a word, or they can sit back and think of a different way to teach a classroom of kids maths. If she likes english, find out why english teachers are learning programming (cos they are) or which area she is interested in and what tools they are using.