An AI-powered chatbot, a beach cat videogame, and a stress management website were among the projects presented at the 2023 UArizona Girls Who Code Project Showcase. The club aims to close the gender gap in technology by offering free coding classes to 6–12 graders. It’s taught by UArizona graduate and undergraduate students.
“Girls Who Code is totally worth it,” says Alysia Seery, a sixth grader at Alice Vail Middle School. “It is really fun, and the facilitators are nice.” At the Project Showcase, students were stationed at laptops and demonstrated their projects to spectators.
Bella Campa, an eighth grader at Orange Grove Middle School, created a therapy chatbot designed to comfort people in crisis. She coded the project in Python and designed it with cross-platform compatibility so that it can be used on phones or computers. Bella says that her favorite part of Girls Who Code was “learning how to create AI to take over the world,” and she hopes to work at Google one day.
Sylvia Himmelhuber, a sixth grader at Khalsa Montessori School, conversed easily about the technical specifications of her text-based fantasy adventure game. She describes the club as “fun and chill” and said that she plans to be an artist or video game programmer.
UArizona Girls Who Code launched in 2017 with the mission of exposing girls to technology and providing them with a path to careers in STEM. “It is critical to get girls interested in technology early,” says Dr. Stephanie Murphy, Director of UArizona Women in Science and Engineering, the organization that sponsors the club. “Women are underrepresented in tech, and we want to change that.”
UArizona Girls Who Code splits training into two parts—coding instruction in the fall and project development in the spring.
“The first semester is focused on coding fundamentals,” says Amy Paul, a computer science graduate student who volunteers at the club. “In the second semester, we help students apply what they learned and develop a project of their own.”
UArizona Girls Who Code meets on Saturdays at the UArizona Main Library. If you are interested in signing up for the 2023-2024 academic year, join the UArizona Girls Who Code mailing list using this link: https://forms.gle/un3cw7ofKB9RV9tT8 .
