In a study conducted to determine why girls decide not to learn to code, Google found that most girls’ decision is made before they even enter college. Girls are more likely to be interested in science if they are engaging with the subject at a young age. Code.org offers beginning coding lessons for kids starting at age 6, using popular characters from Frozen, Star Wars, and Angry Birds.
Black Girls Code is an organization dedicated to giving girls of color the tools to develop their own future. In the past they have held events such as a Robot Expo, Build a Webpage in a Day and an App Inventor & Beta Game Jam.
The Black Lunch Table Wikipedia Edit-a-thons
The Black Lunch Table is an ongoing collaboration between artists Jina Valentine and Heather Hart. Their series strives to close the gap in the documentation of art history through guided conversations among cultural producers of color.
Currently, The Black Lunch Table is organizing edit-a-thons at The McColl Center of Art + Innovation to “create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives and works of visual artists from the African Diaspora.”
Code: Debugging the Gender Gap
Code: Debugging the Gender Gap is 20__ documentary profiling the lives of several women in the tech industry and attempts to unravel the intertwining reasons for why there is a dearth of women and minorities in tech. Find a screening near you or organize one for your community here.
Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD) is a new initiative which seeks to increase the number of people of African descent actively editing Wikipedia. On Saturday, February 27th join the Bronx Council of the Arts, working with AfroCROWD Initiative, for a Black Life Matters Edit-a-thon at Hostos Community College. RSVP here.
WikiProject Women in Red’s aims to decrease the content gender gap on Wikipedia. They frequently hold edit-a-thons and are currently hosting a virtual edit-a-thon on black women’s history.
Deep Lab is a cyberfeminist collective made up of researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers. Looking at issues such as surveillance, coding, race, privacy and capitalism, their work manifests as lecture series, publications, contemporary art, public programming and performances. View a short documentary about Deep Lab here.
Trans*H4ck’s mission is to develop open source tech products to benefit trans and gender non-conforming communities. Since their 2013 launch, Trans*H4ck has had over 600 transgender developers, designers, and aspiring coders present at their hackathons, producing mobile apps that are used by trans* and gender non-conforming people across the country.