From this January till March 2019, the British Council Cultural Centre celebrated the theme of Women and STEM through several activities. The “Hour of Code: Girl’s Edition” is one of those.
“Hour of Code: Girl’s Edition” is an interactive coding session solely focused on learning to code through puzzle solving games. These sessions bring up the points regarding code and creating interest in the long run.
These coding sessions have engaged around 34 girls from different partnering schools. All of them aged more than ten years.
Coding is considered to be the language of the future. Various groups and organisations offer similar types of coding workshops; where the rate of girl participants is meagre. To ignite interest among girls and to create gender balance in this male-dominated field, the British Council Cultural Centre came up with this unique only-girls programme.
With an overwhelming response from the students, we have completed two sessions and are going to arrange the third one this March. Most of these participants did not have any prior experience in coding. All of them have enjoyed these sessions and got an opportunity to learn the basics of coding.
One of our participants has shared her experience with us on how this session created her interest in coding. Yea Noor Tazrin is from Viqarunissa Noon School and College and was a participant of our second session of “Hour of Code: Girl’s Edition”.
“I am Yea Noor Tazrin of class 7 of one of the renowned schools of Bangladesh. As a student of Viqarunissa Noon School and College, I was one of the lucky girls to take part in this workshop. Well, the Hour of Code session was very enjoyable. The coding section had five levels in total. I learned more about the directions in the coding section. I got the first-hand experience in all levels of coding. The levels got harder and harder over time, and that was more and more interesting. I think all girls should indulge themselves in coding because it is as much interesting as puzzling or any other interesting games that are played with the brain. I think girls are as much competent in coding as boys.”