In the last seven days, I’ve had two parents ask me what they should do about a teenage girl who wants to program and is general a STEM person. Well there are lots of resources, but programming is a bit of a strange beast. Yes you can sit in a class and learn, but programming is something that seems to grab people and there is nothing like something to motivate your learning, so two suggestions:
- Get involved Hackathons. There are woman specific ones and they are in all shapes and sizes from black hat to VR to everything else under the sun. Just search meetup.com for your local one or use your google-fu.
- Learn online. Seriously, the online tools are just incredible. The question is where to start. While there are lots of different ways to do this and many people like Java as a start. Personally, I think Python is one of the most ubiquitous of all languages and particularly with machine learning it is coming back into favor. My favorite new language these days is Swift because it gets you into mobile programming almost immediately and it is so cool to have something run on your phone.
