Teach Me Computer Science Earlier

Today, Terri and I had some fun with the Girls@VV camp held here at Carleton. Here's a teaser:

I borrowed some material from my games mini-course for girls and put together a few slides about what computer science is and how women fit in. We had a discussion on why girls don't get into it, why that's a bad thing, and what would help. Then we did the finite state machine activity from CS Unplugged. Terri from CU-WISE also came out to help. What a blast we had!

As was the case for my mini-course, these girls had amazing insight into the reasons girls aren't very interested. The title of this post represents a major theme: they want to learn about what computer science really is early on in their school lives!

Keep reading to find out more about what these girls suggested!