Brownies to learn coding in bid to involve more girls in technology

The Guides are going to investigate and learn coding in a bid to shift stubborn attitudes among girls thatStem careers are only for boys.

Girlguiding found that more than half of girls and women between the ages of 11 and 21 believed Stem was for boys. The strength of feeling has not changed.

Happy Appy, a session on apps for Rainbows, and the guides branch for four- to seven-year-olds will be included in the courses. Polling shows that primary-age girls are less likely to consider Stem a preserve of boys than those who are older.

Girls and women are underrepresented in certain Stem school subjects. Only 9% of female students progress to A-level in physics, compared with 8.3% and 2% for male students. Girls are more likely to get a top grade if they take A-level physics.

The percentage of women in the core Stem workforce in England fell 2% from 26% to 24% in 2020.

It was sad to hear some Brownies say they couldn't be a doctor because they were Guides.

She said she was called a nerd and a geek at school because of her interest in computing.

Aviation, invention and space are related Brownie badges. The most popular badges among Guides are mixology, upcycling, and backwoods cooking.

People think about drawing and painting as being creative, but technology is incredibly creative, according to Nicole McWilliams, who leads the engineering group for Android smartphones at Google. It is like a blank canvas and a box of crayons.

It's unfair that people think it's more for boys. We all use technology in our daily lives.

She said that most of the girls in her class don't know anyone who wants to be an engineer.

A former computer science teacher who works for Stem Learning, a government-backed organisation which aims to improve science and technology teaching, said she had noticed that girls aged nine and 10 had no problem getting stuck into experimenting with a robot, but by the age of 12. She said that the girls were as successful as the boys once pushed.

Half of the Scouts membership lost during the Pandemic has returned with the restart of in-person meetings. After falling by a quarter to 363,000 from 2020 to 2021, youth membership rebounded to nearly 422,000. The chief scout called for more adult volunteers to handle the surge.