By Emily Holsapple Bush | Manager of Individual Giving and Special Events
We’re so excited to announce expansion of the Girls Who Code Clubs program to 49 states across the country, as well as Guam and Puerto Rico in the 2016/2017 school year. Your support is helping us scale this incredible program to meet demand across the country and to meet girls where they are in their own communities.
While the Summer Immersion Program will continue to be our flagship program, we believe our path to scale and to closing the gender gap in tech is through our Girls Who Code Clubs Program. We believe our Clubs efforts will help us move quickly to dramatically expand the reach of our programs and to ensure that our students persist in computer science and get the support they need to succeed.
In the next year, we’ll triple our free after-school Clubs Program to 1500 clubs in every state in the country. So far this year, we’ve already successfully launched close to 900!
Through our Clubs program, we’ll provide access to GWC programming at scale and serve tens of thousands of girls. While girls’ interest in computer science declines over time, the greatest drop-off happens in middle and high school. We call this the “middle school cliff” -- the period in middle and high school when girls’ interest in computer science declines dramatically at the same time that boys’ interest grows. GWC Clubs intervene at this critical time and hook girls’ interest.
Clubs are free and open to 6th-12th graders. Hosted at schools, libraries, and community centers, Clubs help girls learn to use computer science to impact their community and provide a sisterhood of supportive peers and role models. During the year, Clubs students will work together and individually on a CS Impact Project, where they will learn to use computer science to solve a problem relevant to their school and community.
Our Clubs model is enormously successful. 75% of our Clubs students report being more likely to take a computer science class after participating in a Club, and 65% said they were more likely to major or minor in computer science in college because of GWC.
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