Seeing the Future - GICS26

My 8 year old son once sold our house. It wasn’t the best 3 bedroom home in North London, and having looked around the modest terrace, the couple stepped into the back garden. They were greeted by my smiling middle child, who politely greeted them, and then proceeded to kick his football around the 10x5m ‘lawn’. In that single encounter, the couple - expecting their first child - were hooked. They had seen their future!

I work in a girls school, and the year I joined, only one student complete the A level. There were great numbers at GCSE, but we weren’t keeping them onto the A level course. The draw of traditional sciences seemed too appealing, especially when university courses barely mention Computer Science in their published entrance requirements. Numbers have increased since, but it still felt like students who would do well were not choosing the subject.

To me the answer lay in role models. Students couldn’t see their future selves, certainly not in me!

And so we tried something different - a Girls In Computer Science conference, just for year 10 girls.

Why year 10? To me, this is where the really keen are lost. Despite what everyone said - and there is some negativity - they’ve opted for the GCSE but it isn’t delivering on what they hoped. They wanted to ‘change the world’, but they end up writing validation and authentication algorithms. And as year 10 wanes towards year 11, this is when they start to consider which of their subjects they might take after GCSEs.

So we started small last year, inviting our local partner of schools, and one school put their trust in us and brought their 5 girls. We put together a program to cover coding, algorithms, design and future careers. We also wanted this to be truly collaborative, so insisted that pairs of students worked with another pair from a different school where possible. And we invited alumnae working in the industry to come back and talk about their work.

We learned from this first year. The algorithms task was open ended, but students from the other school had done something similar as part of the GCSE and were less engaged. We needed to do things not on the specification. The coding task went well - we introduced the girls to the concept of nearest neighbour using an RGB colour matching program. Seeing that it was ‘just Pythagoras’, but it cleverly found the ‘closest’ matching colour (drawn with turtle graphics) brought that curiosity missing from GCSE lessons, and also the challenge to how else could this be used.

But it was the design task which I believe put the energy into the day. The workshop session challenges groups to design their own embedded systems - an original concept, design considerations and some thought about the algorithms required. This really ensured students from different schools collaborated. In the afternoon, when all the workshops were finished, we returned to this task, giving them 15 minutes to get ready to present their idea.

And then it was show and tell time. One pair stayed and presented the group’s idea, whilst the others look around at what the others achieved, and then they swapped.

It’s at this point our invited alumnae really came into their own. Year 10 students found themselves presenting their ideas to our visiting software engineers who’d left school in the last decade - and they all really got into it. We presented a few certificates to groups at the end for best concept, best design etc.

The day finished with 30 minutes of questions to our panel of software developers. We invited our current Y12 students to collate questions from the students and lead the discussion, and the questions covered everything from what you did at school, to what are the toughest challenges in your work. Of course their views on AI were sought too, and what the future looks like.

It has to be said that all this doesn’t happen without a team of people - the support and encouragement of the teaching staff, the admin staff ensuring everything runs smoothly and most importantly the amazing software developing alumnae who give up their time and do so much to add authenticity to the day.

 

Last year, numbers of girls wanting to do computer science in the sixth form at our school dramatically increased. We’ve just run our second annual GICS conference in June, inviting a total of 6 schools (via CAS) and having about 70 girls in attendance. It was great to have the opportunity to open this up to other schools and share the day with them. Perhaps, like my house buying couple, in this short encounter our students may have glimpsed their future selves.