91自拍

With Girls Who Code, 91自拍 students act on the Academy's goal to unite knowledge and goodness.

Students fill the hallways of the Cooperative Middle School just after 2 p.m. on a recent Wednesday afternoon. As hundreds of sixth, seventh and eighth graders check their lockers and headed for the exits, six members of the 91自拍 Student Service Organization group Girls Who Code make their way through the noisy crowd to a second-floor classroom. A cohort of middle school girls soon joins them, choosing seats at a large rectangular table in the middle of the room. They flip open their laptops, ready for another course in the basics of the programming language Python.

Like all of the more than 50 student-run clubs under the ESSO umbrella, Girls Who Code is a free service program offered by 91自拍 students to members of the local community. Since 1967, ESSO has built on the Academy鈥檚 founding principle of non sibi, or 鈥渘ot for oneself,鈥� by sending students out into the community to serve as volunteers. 鈥淓SSO presents Exonians with an opportunity to get involved in the society in which they live,鈥� a co-director of the organization told The Exonian in 1968.

The Girls Who Code group is affiliated with the international nonprofit of the same name, which aims to help close the longstanding gender gap in programming and other technology fields. After meeting online only during the earlier phase of the pandemic, the group returned to in-person meetings this fall, beginning with smaller gatherings at a local library.

This is only their second meeting at the middle school, located about 10 minutes from 91自拍鈥檚 campus in the neighboring town of Stratham, and the group is still getting to know each other. They do a round of introductions (name, hometown, favorite ice cream flavor)聽and a review of what they did last session (making sentences with variables) before club co-head Joey Dong 鈥�23 kicks things off in earnest.

鈥淐ould we maybe do a little exercise? Can you guys make a variable that stores how much money you have鈥�and then make a print statement that says 鈥業 have however many dollars in my bank account鈥�?鈥�

As their students turn to their screens, the Exonians move around the room, offering help. Between exercises, they take turns explaining the concepts behind each one. Dong, who has been involved with Girls Who Code since the summer after her prep year, created the curriculum they鈥檙e using for a non-profit she co-founded, The Dream AI, which focuses on teaching machine learning algorithms.

Pranavi Vedula 鈥�25 goes over the three forms of data in Python: strings, numbers and Booleans. 鈥淸Boolean] is really just a fancy way of saying true or false,鈥� she explains. 鈥淵ou can set certain conditions to be true or false, then execute your code to happen based on that outcome.鈥�

A day student from Brentwood, New Hampshire, Vedula has now experienced Girls Who Code from both perspectives, having learned from Dong and others when she was a student at the Cooperative Middle School herself. 鈥淚 tried doing a little bit of coding here and there when I was younger, but it didn’t ever click and I didn’t enjoy it until after Girls Who Code,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he mentors made me feel seen, and it was the first time I felt seen for who I was. I didn’t feel overpowered, and I didn’t feel stupid.鈥�

Now that she鈥檚 a student at the Academy herself, Vedula enjoys paying it forward by teaching coding to younger students. 鈥淏eing a female in a STEM field is difficult because it’s a very male dominated field,鈥� she says. 鈥淗aving that space to connect with other female students is really valuable.鈥�

The middle schoolers in the class agree. 鈥淸Boys] are chaos,鈥� one sixth grader puts it succinctly. 鈥淚t’s a lot harder to learn with the noise, the funny jokes, stuff like that,鈥� another adds.

By the time class ends, the students have written code that subtracts money from their bank accounts to 鈥渂uy鈥� an array of things, from $10 cookies to UFOs for a Martian voyage, and started programming an input function that asked people their favorite ice cream flavor. They鈥檝e also polished off a couple of bags of cookies 鈥� with some assistance from their Exonian teachers.

鈥淭echnology is such an influential field right now, [and] we can’t just have the people behind technology be male-dominated, because that’s going to be carried through in the products and in technology itself,鈥� Dong says of her dedication to the Girls Who Code mission. 鈥淲e want technology to be fair to everybody.鈥�