Apple Celebrating International Women's Day With 'Girls Who Code' Partnership and More Throughout March

[Jmausmuc]

I highly doubt the reason why women aren’t picking up these career paths as much as men is because of sexism.
I mean I know there are some people these days who believe that mean and women are exactly the same and gender is just a social construct but If you just look at women compared to men, you can already spot a huge difference. It’s quite a stretch to believe that even though men and women look (and act) so different, that inside their heads, everything is the same.
Why can’t we just appreciate the beauty of the differences between men and women and let everyone follow their dreams without having to press everyone into a certain career? If you are a “housewife” many feminists will now actually hate on you for taking care of your children. It’s crazy.

I have tried to open all the doors for my past and current GFs to get involved with technology but the response was very muted to say the least.
I tried to teach them games/let them play, tried to get them excited about my new electric car and so on. They just didn’t care just the same way like wegen they were explaining to me the details of fashion and wanted to go to the fashion week with me.
To each their own.

 

[cmaier]

So where are all the Basic interpreters and the beginner's games done with them, directly on a phone? Lua? Hypercard clones?

One carefully limited app by Apple doesn't fix the problem. Can you make an app and publish it with swift playgrounds?

Apple will definitely have to have “Xcode for iPad” at some point, for sure. But that’s pretty off-topic. The point is exposing girls to coding so they can see if they develop an interest in learning to code, in which case iPads Playgrounds is an excellent way to start. The goal isn’t to breed an army of 9 year old girls to populate the App Store with new apps.

Personally, the class I give to 4th grade girls to teach them swift involves mac Xcode, iPad playgrounds, an r2d2 robot, and an old-school whiteboard.

 

[tkermit]

countries that are the most egalitarian end up with reduced female participation in STEM, commonly referred to as the "gender paradox."

Yeah, that kind of makes you think. I used to assume (wanted it to be true that) all differences between men's and women's interests could be explained by nurture and the cultural environment alone. But I've come to realize that not only is there insufficient evidence for that but that the evidence seems to support the opposite, i.e. that there are (on average) some biological differences and the only question is the extent to which either nature or nurture contribute to the current situation. I certainly wouldn't underestimate the influence of the surrounding culture, even today, but biology likely has an impact as well. Not that I'm married to that position, if anyone wants to prove me wrong.

 

[CarlJ]

So where are all the Basic interpreters and the beginner's games done with them, directly on a phone? Lua? Hypercard clones?

FWIW, there's an extremely good Python app for iOS, called Pythonista. I've seen numerous Basic interpreters over the years, as well as Scheme and Lua. They tend to fall off the store because they take a lot of work to get right (and keep updated for iOS changes), but don't get nearly the marketshare of a halfway decent game. There are also a ton of apps for exposing kids to programming, besides Swift Playgrounds - Scratch Jr being one of the most popular. iOS and the App Store are not yet a platform for building App-Store-ready apps, but that may be in the future (the iPad Pro models certainly have sufficient horsepower).