Code For Her: Exploring Female and Gender-Diverse Computing Workshops for Faculty, Staff, and Students

Inspired by initiatives like Girls Who Code, the authors developed a similar learning opportunity in a higher education environment. Code for Her, a nine-week coding workshop series, was piloted to determine if interest existed in the academic community. With an overwhelming response (over 100 applicants), the authors saw a need in the community for an informal learning space targeting women and gender-diverse individuals. Currently, two distinct workshop sections, one for students and one for faculty and staff, are being conducted in a single academic semester, each focusing on learning three web development languages. The goal of this study is to investigate the impacts of the workshop series on its participants using a mixed methods approach. The authors will examine measures of self-efficacy, computing behavior, knowledge, and learning to determine, at an exploratory level, how the workshops have an effect on their learning, motivation, attitudes, and computational thinking. Preliminary results from a baseline survey indicate that keeping a flexible curriculum and learning environment is imperative to the ever-changing needs of participants week to week. Further, results indicate a slightly positive attitude towards achieving programming tasks, future predictors of their behavior after the workshop, and self-efficacy. The authors plan to conduct a post survey, collect participant projects as artifacts for analysis, and arrange follow-up focus groups to determine if participant attitudes, motivation, and retention of the content have changed over a period of time. The authors hope to improve future workshop offerings and expand our research efforts.