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Committed to lessening the gap in tech education, Amador Valley High School’s Girls Who Code program was honored with the 2021 California School Board Association (CSBA) Golden Bell Award in the area of Equity and Access during a ceremony on Dec. 2.
Celebrating their 42nd year, the Golden Bell Awards recognize “outstanding programs and governance practices” in public education, as well as “the depth and breadth of education programs and governance decisions supporting these programs that are necessary to address students’ changing needs, according to a statement from the Pleasanton Unified School District.
Intended to spark interest in computer science and STEM careers among girls in grades 3 to 8, Girls Who Code has expanded its offerings since forming in 2016 to include career education, mentoring events and volunteer opportunities for Amador students. Grade school students are taught by members of the Girls Who Code program who have completed higher-level computer science courses, creating a supportive and empowering environment for young learners.
Amador senior and Girls Who Code president Anusha Maheshwari said she became interested in coding early because her father was a software engineer. “I created motion sensors with my dad using coding that turned on sprinklers whenever dogs or other unwanted animals walk onto the lawn,” Maheshwari said.
After learning “there weren’t more girls who are interested in computer science,” Maheshwari found the club and its advisor, teacher Kevin Kiyoi during her freshman year.
The club held its first annual one-day Girls Who Code Summit in March 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown. This year members faced social distancing restrictions and were unable to present in person, but were able to host a virtual event via Zoom with support from PUSD. In total, the summit hosted more than 130 students from Pleasanton and other Bay Area communities, as well as students from the East Coast.
“We believe the Summit is a very unique project that can be easily blueprinted and replicated across the Country. We’re moving in the right direction, but we can do better,” Kiyoi said.
Featuring a Microsoft cloud advocate as their keynote speaker, students and mentors worked in breakout groups and learned how to build a website using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, culminating in the creation of a webpage supporting one of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The district said that “by creatively finding new and innovative ways to teach programming through different coding languages and environments, students will be able to attend a new summit where they will learn different skills, up to six different times (grades 3 – 8) over the years.”
