By Casey Neill
Girls at Springvale Rise Primary are taking on the tech sector.
The school established the TechShe Stars coding club for girls in Years 2 to 6 this year.
It held an open afternoon for parents on Monday 27 November to showcase the club and the skills the participants have learnt.
Year 5 and 6 teacher Bec Sutherland learnt that fewer girls than boys chose to study computer science subjects at secondary school.
She wanted to make girls more enthusiastic about digital technology skills.
“If you ask a young child to draw a computer scientist, most of them will draw a man,” Mrs Sutherland said.
“It is important for girls to see that they have the same ability as the boys to be a software application developer or a web developer in the future.”
She said that according to the Foundation for Young Australians, more than half of Australian workers would need to be able to use, configure or build digital systems in the next two to three years.
Mrs Sutherland said it was important for students in primary school to be able to problem solve using reason, decomposition, patterns and abstraction and to become familiar with skills that developed their computational thinking, like understanding algorithms.
“Students have also developed resilience, confidence and collaboration skills, which are vital for students to be able to learn and succeed in all areas,” she said.
The coding club has been able to learn these skills through block coding, using a program called Hopscotch and learning how to code robots to make them move.
Mrs Sutherland said they had become confident in these skills and were collaborating with other students and teachers to continue their computer science journey.
