Coding camp in Hyderabad where boys are not allowed!

Girls Code Camp’ works exclusively for girls to break stereotypes generally associated with girls

A  man with thick-rimmed glasses and the customary acne-prone skin, perpetually dressed in a hoodie or sweater — that’s the stereotypical image of a computer programmer as popularised by TV shows and films. How often do we see this character portrayed by a woman? Stanford University student Aashna Shroff proves otherwise. To break this image, she went a step further and founded Girls Code Camp in 2014, a Hyderabad-based social venture that conducts coding camps, exclusively for girls. Highlighting another stereotype, Aashna says, “A lot of schools beg us to hold similar workshops for boys saying that they are ‘Better at it!’ Why presume they would be better? Girls could have an aptitude for it as well.”

This is the cliché the fourth-year student and her team of four Computer Science (CS) students wish to alter. “Changing people’s mindset is not easy. It is what we work towards every day through every school we visit, every person we meet, and every student we teach,” passionately elaborates Satwik Pochampally, a member of the camp. The team conducts workshops at multiple schools in Hyderabad like CHIREC, Oakridge, NASR and others, and their biggest achievement has been a boot camp for underprivileged schools.

“A major obstacle faced when teaching students from low-income backgrounds is that they don’t know how to use a computer,” points out Aashna. Needless to add, their “poor infrastructure, which can be frustrating to use, like old computers. Right now we are working with Dr Reddy’s Foundation, who were kind enough to arrange for laptops,” says the 21-year-old. Another solution they came up with is taking students to a ‘host school’. These schools lend space for the boot camp, the general module of which contains three workshops — mobile app development, web development, and hands-on tinkering. This hardly sounds like something students can learn out of a two-day workshop, hence they intend to start after-school clubs. They also plan to host Hack Day, an opportunity for students who have attended their workshops to build something on their own using skills that they have learnt during the workshop, an annual affair.