Google, National Parks Partner To Let Girls Program White House Xmas Tree Lights

theodp writes The Washington Post reports the White House holiday decor is going digital this year, with dog-bots and crowdsourced tree lights. "Thanks to Google's Made with Code initiative," reports a National Park Foundation press release, "girls across the country will experience the beauty of code by lighting up holiday trees in President's Park, one of America's 401 national parks and home to the White House." Beginning on December 2, explains the press release, girls can head over to Google's madewithcode.com (launched last June by U.S. CTO Megan Smith, then a Google X VP), to code a design for one of the 56 state and territory trees. Girls can select the shape, size, and color of the lights, and animate different patterns using introductory programming language and their designs will appear live on the trees. "Made with Code is a fun and easy way for millions of girls to try introductory code and see Computer Science as a foundation for their futures. We're thrilled that this holiday season families across the country will be able to try their hands at a fun programming project," said former Rep. Susan Molinari, who now heads Google's lobbying and policy office in Washington, DC.

Comments

Re:Girls, girls, girls...

[Trepidity]

It's fairly common to have programs specifically for underrepresented groups, especially if there is a goal of changing traditional perceptions that led to that underrepresentation. With gender it works the other way as well, with male-targeted programs in traditionally female occupations, such as those run by the American Assembly for Men in Nursing.

In principle none of these occupations have to do with gender, but due to the significant imbalance and cultural attitudes around it, I think being a man in nursing, or a woman in programming, can be a bit weird, different from just "any other job".

Déjà Vu: the first christmas tree on the

[mdtiemann]

Anybody remember this: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12... ?

"Thousands of Internet tourists used their computers to tap into a central computer at Cygnus Support, a software company in Mountain View, Calif., to see the "xmastree." (The name itself is a joke to cyberspace insiders, who regularly use programs with names that start with "x," as in xterm or xwindows.)

"Two programmers at Cygnus had wired a real, 7-foot Christmas tree directly to the company's internal computer network, using simple controllers that enabled people on Cygnus Support's office network to turn the decorations, bells and lights on and off without leaving their computer terminals. The 6,000 or so outsiders who peered in from the Internet could view a simple computer rendering of the tree and check a status report to see which doodads were on and which were off, but only the people on Cygnus's local network could play with the switches."

Re:Girls, girls, girls...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Barbie showed her drawing to Skipper. "Isn't that a pretty Christmas tree light pattern? The arrows show how it'll go!"

"Oooooih! That's pretty! I can't wait to see it!" squealed Skipper!

"Hmmmm," thought Barbie. "Now all I need is one of the boys to program it for me!"
(3 pages skipped)
"And programming...done! Switch it on! Oh, here, like this [switches it on]", said the boy.

"And our national winner of best Christmas tree programmer is Barbie Mattel!" The president grinned and shook her hand. "What an excellent programmer!"

"I know!" exclamatederionoed Barbie!

Re:But, as the feminists say..

[dgatwood]

I'm completely for stopping all kinds of discrimination, but when you're taking things from the grandchildren of the people who actually performed the discrimination, you're doing it wrong.

Yup. And if you introduce systemic biases (quotas, lowered entrance requirements, etc.) to encourage girls to do something, then invariably some of those girls will be less qualified than the boys who get excluded. When the boys notice this (and they will), then they'll start to assume that all girls are less qualified. And thanks to confirmation bias, this perception will tend to strengthen over time, because they'll always notice the underqualified women and won't notice the qualified women. Thus, in the long run, using reverse biasing to counter discrimination almost invariably leads to more discrimination, not less.

And although it is unclear whether contests that are strictly for women will have the same effect, at a minimum, they'll cause envy, which is almost certainly not an effective way to encourage men to take women in STEM more seriously.

You can't fix discrimination with more discrimination. The only way to fix discrimination is with marketing—by hyping the heck out of members of underrepresented groups who are good at what they do, so that they'll serve as examples for other people in those underrepresented groups, and will encourage them to work harder to overcome the discrimination and take jobs in particular fields. This approach is also the only way to counteract the confirmation bias that is the source of nearly all discrimination—by repeatedly showing examples that contradict the biased expectations, and by showing those counterexamples far more often than they see confirmatory examples.

For example, if you want to get more girls into a contest like this, when you advertise the contest, use mostly pictures of girls. Don't change the rules; don't change the requirements; change the image you project. Unlike every other strategy, this works, and has been repeatedly proven to work through decades of advertising research.