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Girls and Software

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Re: Girls and Software

#201

Post by Crito »

ucarion wrote: post #172
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #42

> Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try. And that's why we can't use sexism to fight sexism (or mistakenly enforce the same composition of the general population on self-selected subsets).

I disagree. As a high schooler, I know many intelligent and creative young women who don't want to do robotics or programming because of the people in those fields. High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and this discourages girl…

When I was in highschool, I was in a model rocket club, and the science olympiad club. The gender ratios for both were roughly 50:50 (3-4 female-male for the rocket club, I forget the exact numbers for the science olympiad club, somewhere around 10-10). Both clubs operated very smoothly.

I think that you give highschoolers too little credit.

Rocketry and science competitions are not really any different from robotics and programming. None of them are exactly football team, if you know what I mean. The only real differences between "model rockets nerdy" and "programming nerdy" are a result of how the adults treat the participants.

Re: Girls and Software

#202

Post by gizmo686 »

gruseom wrote: post #58
VonGuard wrote: post #50

themade.org teaches free programming classes to kids. We've been doing this for 2 years now, and most of the time, our ratios are 50/50. Yesterday, in fact, we had 3 boys and 6 girls for our scratch class, then had 8 girls and 2 boys for our interactive fiction class, taught in Twine. Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, the…

How do you get kids modding Minecraft? I suggested this a little while ago for a kid in my brother-in-law's Grade 8 class, but then regretted it because the tools for doing it seemed inaccessible to beginners.

You help them with the tooling. You will also need to say "because, magic" far more often then with most projects, but if you have someone who knows what they are doing walk you through the difficult, boilerplate type, parts, then modding minecraft is generally not exceptionally difficult. The other risk you have is the chance that they will want to interact with some less explored part of the code, in which case the problem goes from boilerplate/tooling difficult to normal difficult.

Probably the best way to go about it is create a dumbed down interface for them to work with. When they inevitably want to go outside of what you wrapped, you can either wrap the additional functionality they need, or show them how to use the underlying API.

Re: Girls and Software

#203

Post by [deleted] »

stchangg wrote: post #43
superuser2 wrote: post #12

>Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12. The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room. Much of even…

I'm a female developer w/ a EE degree, but mostly self-taught wrt coding. My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring thi…

[deleted]

Re: Girls and Software

#204

Post by nitrogen »

arrrg wrote: post #168
nitrogen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive. I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance. I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic comes from those same…

Oh man, even more zero sum thinking. Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice. The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter. But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

From the article:

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't warrant disgust.

Re: Girls and Software

#205

Post by picomancer »

arrrg wrote: post #171
jiggy2011 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are younger the scarcity is money, not time. When I was younger I would have liked to dress fashionably or go out and do more sociable activities , but it was either that or buy computer parts and software etc. I couldn't have afforded both. By the time you get a job that lets you afford both you don't necessarily want to learn fashion from scratch.

That seems mostly like a class issue (which is also pretty awful, no doubt, though not something everyone faces). Also: As I said, I know hackers tend to have hobbies. And not cheap ones. Also, computers have dropped massively in price during the last twenty years. I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities, at least not during the last two decades, but now it’s quite a…

> I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities

I disagree. In middle school I had a textbook on assembly language; the first chapters used DEBUG (a 16-bit debugger which came with DOS) but later chapters switched to programming in Microsoft MASM which was $180.

I remember thinking, "There's no way my hacking budget can take that. It'll take me years to save up that kind of money, and when/if I do, I'm definitely gonna blow it on video games."

I learned a lot by writing a QBASIC script which added label functionality to DEBUG to make it more usable assembling large programs.

Also, the only C compiler I had was Turbo C++ Lite for DOS, which came with another textbook I picked up for cheap (I recall $20). It was crippled: You could only run programs from within the IDE. If you used the "compile to EXE" option, it would work but the resulting executable would do nothing, just spitting out an error message along the lines of "Only the full version of the compiler can produce working executables".

But because different programs produced different-sized executables, I figured that meant the EXE file wasn't just a placeholder, it actually contained the compiled code but it was disabled somehow.

I figured out through tracing and in-memory patching (with DEBUG of course!) that there was a conditional branch within the first couple hundred instructions. Replacing it fixed the problem!

Kids these days have it so easy. All of the tools you need have excellent FOSS versions you can instantly download. Online resources are more comprehensive and up-to-date than any textbook. Modern languages have garbage collection and array bounds checking, eliminating entire classes of bugs.

Re: Girls and Software

#206

Post by omilu »

kstenerud wrote: post #101
simias wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that. But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving…

That stuff was there during the BBS days as well. I just don't buy that "seeing bad shit fucks people up forever" bullshit. You wrap your kids in cotton and stifle them throughout their childhoods with your helicopter parenting, and then you have the AUDACITY to complain when they grow up weak and immature?

Hush now baby, baby don't you cry Mama's gonna make all of your Nightmares come true Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you Mama's gonna keep you right here Under her wing She won't let you fly but she might let you sing Mama will keep baby cosy and warm Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Ooooh Babe Of course Mama's gonna help build the wall

Re: Girls and Software

#207

Post by Rylinks »

supersystem wrote: post #129
HedgeMage wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it might be awkward at first for girls who don't have a lot of experience in mixed-gender environments. If it's a friendly mixed-gender environment, the awkwardness wears off pretty soon. I've watched it happen. On the other hand, "foo for women" events are high-pressure environments that put a spotlight on poor newbies. It's a way of saying "You aren't just here to learn something, you're representing women, y…

I don't think anyone, regardless of gender, should be forced to "fit in with mainstream hacker culture".

Would you say the same about the mainstream culture in other fields, or is it hacker culture in particular?

Re: Girls and Software

#208

Post by codygman »

krstck wrote: post #71
simias wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that. But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving…

> But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... Those are all there in the real world, too. You can't protect kids from anything harmful or scary, nor should you. Stumbling across a porn or horror site is probably more traumatizing for the adult, anyway. It's like people have forgotten what it's like to be a kid! You've been told…

You're not really a 4 year old until you see your first beheading on the internet!

Re: Girls and Software

#209

Post by [deleted] »

e12e wrote: post #133

Many good points in this article, but I think it falls short in analysing what's changed (or what's wrong). > Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it. Well, yes. Computing…

[deleted]

Re: Girls and Software

#210

Post by arrrg »

nitrogen wrote: post #204
arrrg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, even more zero sum thinking. Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice. The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter. But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

From the article: Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it. You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't warrant disgust.

I’m not sure how exclusionary rhetoric follows from that. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Also, I think that statement is just outright wrong and misleading.

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