....................don't talk about computing club
It struck me today that my computing club is made up almost entirely of girls. It also occurred to me that I hadn't ever publicly called it computing club.
I started the group to work up some entries for the Sonic Pi space music competition. A small group of students (10) arrived the first week and I showed them how to set up the Raspberry Pi and gave them a quick introduction to the Sonic Pi interface. Before long they were producing basic tunes and adding loops.
The group has since grown to around 15 regularly attending students and they are all engaging in coding pieces of music for the competition. It was not until I was looking through the list that I realised quite how many girls I had ended up with. out of the 15 I only have 3 boys who regularly attend (compared with our scratch games club that is entirely boys).
I have worked before with groups of students using Sonic Pi and found that it is great for engaging all students (not mainly the boys like a lot of the robotics work I have done) but this was something different as none of the students had used Sonic Pi before.
This was a marketing issue!
I sent round the poster along with a note to all of the Y7-9 classes asking for anyone who wanted to try making music with the Raspberry Pi, no previous experience necessary. There was no mention of computing, coding, or programming.
The response was all from students who were interested in making music rather than those interested in programming. They now all know (not that it was a big secret really) that to make the music they are coding, but they are making music. This appears to be a difference in the approach to what they are doing and has affected how they are engaged with something new. They are not intrinsically interested in the method of making the computer do something, they are interested in the end result (in this case music).
I now have a predominantly female group of programmers all engaged in coding. Once we have finished working on the music competition I am going to be looking for ways to maintain this engagement using the output as the motivator and the coding as the 'what you have to do to get there' bit.
