This is in reply to Emma’s excellent post on young female coders. First off, I think she makes some excellent points, and I think I agree with all of them.

I wanted to provide a possibly complementary or parallel theory. Again, her disclaimer applies to this, I’m basing this on my own thoughts and experiences, however those experiences include a lot of working with autodidactic children who are in to computers in some form.

The impression I got from Emma’s points were that the driving force behind learning to program is partly the love of learning something new, or to gain social status in some way.

I expect this is true to some extent, but I think the most important question is: “what problems will they solve by learning to program?”.

For boys, at least when I was younger the answer to this was normally something to do with computer games. Want more frags? Write a script that will, at the press of a key, throw a grenade and activate your biggest gun quickly. Want to impress your mates? Learn to skin your character (by hacking the games files) to make it look like you/the fat kid at school/the teacher/whatever.

This teaches young hackers something important that we don’t get in many areas of life (and particularly not in school): you can take something apart, change it, put it back together again…and IT’S BLOODY FUN TO DO!

There is no reason that this shouldn’t apply to young women as well, but I suspect the games they play (this is true of a few years back when I was 15/16, but things may have moved on a lot since then) either don’t have the same driving factors or there isn’t the competitive attitude there that would produce the need to hack the game.

One example of this is The Sims (no relation). I know people – mostly girls – who spent hours playing that game. They would create complex setups, creating a routine for each Sim to do when they got back from work, got up in the morning, etc (ok, sometimes they just typed Rosebud in to the console…but that’s hacking, right?).

The point is that they were dedicated to creating systems. Dedicated enough that if they were given a tool to make managing those systems easier they would have seen the time invested in learning it worthwhile.

That tool, obviously, should have been a scripting language, allowing your Sim to be controlled by code. Anyone who can code and knows The Sims will know the type of thing I’m talking about: write a morning routine script that makes them shower, get breakfast, clean up and get to work on time. Sorted, now you can spend more time on the other Sims in the morning.

They would learn programming quickly, sharing scripts on game forums, helping their friends out. They would find cool ways to push the game in ways the designers didn’t intend, to change things, to do fun things.

Then they would realise that real life works in the same way.

Like I say, this could be massively outdated – I’ve not played any of the new games, and I couldn’t even tell you what the cool titles for girls are. For all I know every game comes with an IDE now (I doubt it).

The point is: get easy to use programming tools in to the areas where young people spend their time (Facebook? Their phone? Games?) and they will learn how to code without their teacher and without worrying about looking ‘nerdy’. I suspect a reason more girls don’t code is because there is no advantage to doing so in the things they use most. Let’s change that.

I find it really interesting that Matthew Sephton can hold both of these views, and I'd like him to explain them in a longer format than possible on twitter.

Think of the two protests falling somewhere on a linar scale, with trivial issues at one end and the most serious issues (genocide, corruption and torture by an oppressive regime, etc) at the other.  We could argue about where exactly each protest would appear but I think most would agree that the Egyptians are closer to the serious end than the UK uncut ones.  I'm sure I think the gap is smaller than some others might but nevertheless, there is a gap. (and I consider them both to be closer to the serious end than otherwise)

Matthew Sephton seems to draw the line of acceptable protest (where the people should stand up to their government) somewhere between these two.  I understand that a line could be drawn somewhere on the scale, but we have to look at what is included within the 'unacceptable' side of Matthew Sephton's scale.

Does he really think that people standing up to the government (in the form of peaceful protest) on the issues that UK uncut campaign on should not be allowed?  Can he give us guidance on what issues we should be allowed to protest about?   What issues would place us on the same side of the acceptable line that the Egyptians are on?

Maybe I've wrongly interpreted his position.  If so, I'd really like him to clarify it.