Curriculum

This page was last updated for the 2017-2018 club year. It may contain out of date information.

Mission

Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology. Our programs educate, equip, and inspire girls with the computing skills they’ll need to pursue 21st century opportunities. Our Clubs Program is free and open to 6th to 12th graders. Girls learn to use computer science to impact their community and join our sisterhood of supportive peers and role models.

If you don't know how to code, we'll teach you. If you do know how to code, we'll teach you to code better. GWC is not a program for elite students only -- anybody can learn to code.

Goals

Our club works towards these three goals:

    • Help girls build identities as computer scientists by highlighting and discussing female role models and their work through Women in Tech Spotlights.
    • Give girls practice with computational concepts with self-guided Activity Sets and by creating a CS Impact Project through a design-build-test cycle.
    • Build sisterhood by connecting girls to one another and to our national community of female coders.

Find out more about our Activity Sets and check out our Weekly Session Slides.

Anatomy of a Meeting

Clubs meet for 90 minutes each week. The structure of a meeting varies over time:

    • Most sessions will start with a spotlight on a Women in Tech and continue with a short coding tutorial.
    • At the start of the year, the next section of a club meeting will be spent on self-paced progress through the Activity Sets.
    • Most Coders will have completed one or more sets after 5-10 sessions, and their focus will shift to building independent projects that go into our club gallery, part of our CS Impact Project.
    • Towards the end of each session we hold a GWC Standup meeting, where we share what we've accomplished today, what we will work on next time, and what we need help on.
    • The final 10 minutes of each session, we kick back, socialize, play video games, or write in individual reflection journals.

Extra-curricular Activities

In addition to these routine weekly activities, we sprinkle in other offerings to liven up the club experience.

    • Field Trips. We try to visit industry and academic high-tech settings. Past destinations have included Google Cambridge, Harvard CS Department, Converge Health, and BBN Raytheon.
    • Guest Speakers. We invite speakers to come and share their experiences. We have had speakers from Twitter, Brown, Meditech, Google, and Microsoft.
    • T-Shirts. All club Coders receive a stylish T-shirt they can wear with pride to show their identity as computer scientists.
    • DIY Computers. This year the club will try out the Circuit Playground Express and Little Bits to explore physical computing.

Let us know if you would like to be a guest speaker or host a field trip for our club! Send email to staff@newtongwc.org