Girls Coding - CodePlus

CodePlus involves a partnership between NUI Galway, UL and TCD to enhance the existing CodePlus project, which has been running in TCD since 2015, and will roll it out over a two year period for national impact. It will take advantage of the fact that students, and schools, are now much more comfortable with on-line environments to extend the reach of the project.
In Ireland, participation in computing degrees, and subsequent careers, is much lower in females than in males, signifying a gender imbalance within this field. CodePlus seeks to address this imbalance by encouraging, facilitating and providing opportunities to teenage female students to engage with Computer Science. It will do this at a number of levels to enable them to make more informed decisions about further education courses and ultimately careers in this field. CodePlus will:
i) Offer purposefully designed coding workshops (20 hours in duration) to cohorts of female students. The workshops use a collaborative project based approach to teaching & learning which has proved effective in helping learners engage with CS and more general 21st century skills. Due to COVID restrictions, both face-to-face and online modes of delivery will be available.
ii) Collaborate with tech companies to organise interactive webinars for students to engage with female IT professionals.
iii) Work with tech companies to organise visits, for students, to company offices for tours and talks with female IT professionals (subject to COVID restrictions).
iv) Systematically track the impact of the interventions on participants (short and long-term impact.)