AMADOR VALLEY GIRLS WHO CODE
Congratulations to Amador Valley High School’s Girls Who Code (GWC) program for receiving statewide distinction as a 2021 California School Board Association (CSBA) Golden Bell Award recipient in the area of Equity and Access! Part of a national organization whose “mission is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does,” Amador’s GWC students and advisors have been inspiring more young women in grades 3 - 8 to pursue careers in computer science and STEM since August 2016. Amador Valley’s GWC program, advised by math teacher Kevin Kiyoi, has expanded beyond this mission to offer career education, mentoring events, and volunteer opportunities to AVHS students. “When I was a Freshman [at Amador] I couldn’t believe there weren’t more girls who are interested in computer science, which helped lead me to Mr. Kiyoi and the Girls Who Code club,” said Amador Senior and GWC President Anusha Maheshwari. “T his program has supported the school in raising female enrollment in computer science and STEM courses.” Faced with the restrictions of social distancing and COVID, the second GWC summit in 2021 was virtual. Despite being remote, the event increased attendance by nearly 50 percent from it’s first year crowd of 90 students. The summit hosted over 130
girls from Pleasanton and beyond, who learned about non-traditional routes to find a career in coding, as well as how to build web pages using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The GWC Summit was back in-person in February 2022 attracting its largest attendance to date, hosting 170 students in grades 3 - 7. Participants had the opportunity to learn from student mentors, have lunch with engineers and computer scientists, work on projects using Python Turtle and more. As shown by its resilience in both live and virtual settings over the past three years, the GWC Summit is a thriving program, fueled by the passion of students to increase the number of women in the computer science industry. By creatively finding new and innovative ways to teach programming through different coding languages and environments, students will be able to attend multiple summits throughout their schooling. Mr. Kiyoi remains humble yet an enormous presence for Amador computer science students and GWC club members. “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,” said Kiyoi. “We will do better!” Anusha responded.
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