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Bronx School Aims to Teach the Next Generation of Female Coders

By Eddie Small | April 16, 2015 3:33pm
 A group of girls at the Bronx Writing Academy are creating their own video games.
Girls Who Code
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CONCOURSE — A group of Bronx girls are pushing back against the male dominated gaming world creating their own video games from Scratch.

For the past few weeks Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides educational after school programs, has been teaching 11 sixth grade girls Mondays and Wednesdays at the Bronx Writing Academy how to code their own version of Pac-Man using the programming tool Scratch.

"I've never used Scratch before," said 12-year-old Andayea Anderson. "I was shocked that we could do so many things because I've always wondered how they make video games."

The Bronx Writing Academy offers the class through a program run by Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that works with middle schools to help them expand their school day, and the video game class is taught through Citizen Schools' partnership with Girls Who Code, an organization that aims to achieve gender equality in the tech industry by exposing more girls to computer science at a young age.

Bernice Bonhemaa, 13, said she enjoyed the creative aspect of the class.

"What I like about it is making your own thing with your imagination," she said.

Beth Green, who teaches the class and is a sophomore computer science major at Barnard College, said she was envious that her students were getting to learn about coding and technology so much earlier than she did.

"I was not exposed to that before college at all," she said. "I wish I had something like this."

The girls have already learned how to make a basic video game where a character stands on one end of the screen and has to avoid one object coming toward it while collecting another.

In 12-year-old Dayna Lizardo’s game, the character has to collect dogs that float across the screen while avoiding wizards.

“I tried to do it as realistically as I could,” she said of her game, explaining that wizards were “the most realistic thing I could find.”

The girls are now learning how to create their own Mad Libs with Scratch, a lesson Green also used as an opportunity to talk about variables and parts of speech, and she hopes to have time to teach them one more project before the end of the year. The class culminates on May 18, when the students will get the chance to present one of their projects at a science fair-type event.

Dalissa Toribio, 11, said she wanted to work with Girls Who Code so she could learn about a subject that her other classes did not focus on.

"Here, I can learn stuff that I don't know and make different things," she said.

Kyla Teape, 12, said her favorite part of the class was programming "because then we get to see how our game works."

When students first learned about the video game class, it was fairly popular across gender lines, according to Green.

"In the beginning of the semester, all the different clubs or Citizen Schools classes go around and pitch what they’re going to teach to all the classes so the kids can choose which one they want," she said, "and a lot of times, the boys would be like, 'Why can’t I take this?'"

Although she discussed girls in science, technology and engineering careers with her students at the beginning of the class, gender has not been a focus since then. Rather, the girls are largely just concentrating on their video games.

"I don’t think they think, you know, 'I’m a girl. Why am I coding?'" Green said. "I think they think it's coding. They all play video games now."