[Techtalk] Programming languages for women

[Ms. Piglet]

Ah, well, you see, there's the difference....your parents are likely *my*
generation. <g>

When I was in school, the first place you hit going thru the system that
would have a student-accessible computer was college---and that a big
mainframe with the computing power of....oh....a Palm Pilot.<g>

And there was very much a sense of "routing" students who showed an interest
in the computer area: if a boy expressed interest in computer classes, it
was *assumed* he wanted to be a programmer.  If a girl expressed interest,
she'd have to do some battle to be programmer-track; it was assumed she
wanted to be a keypunch operator, and they'd try hard to steer her that way.

Ergo, at the time I looked at the computer department, said "yeah, right"
and went off my merry way to the humanities department. <g>

On the other hand, my daughters went thru a private school system at the
elementary level with minimal funding, so while they had computers, there
wasn't much---and there was no faculty member capable of debugging problems
with C64s and Apple IIs.  Neither daughter has ever shown any significant
interest in programming, but they've acquired enough competence that
whenever there was a computer problem in grade school that they wanted
looked at immediately, the rule became "Get Beth Zurawicz out of class to
look at it", and sure enough, she generally could fix it, if it was software
or something minor.

If it were major (read: hardware problem), the machine generally came home
with me after school for spouse to beat on. <g>


--pig

On 3/4/02 9:44 PM,  <jennyw at dangerousideas.com> shared this thought:


> In contrast, my little sister and I grew up in a house that had a computer
> when we were in elementary school. Both of our parents were programmers. My
> sister, being an overachiever, once wrote a program to animate Garfield
> kicky Odie for her BASIC class in Jr. High. Needless to say, her teacher and
> classmates were impressed! So, yeah, it does help when you get to learn in
> an encouraging environment.

-- 
Megan "Piglet" Zurawicz
listpig at earthlink.net
piglet170 at attbi.com