This year marks the first year of the new club, Girls Who Code. The club is run by student captains including Sarina Trivedi and Alyssa Serebrenik and two advisors, teachers Minjoo Park and Troy Kroft. 

Originally, the club began as an idea from Trivedi, Serebrenik, and a couple other students wanted to further advance themselves in the field of coding and computer programming and collaborate with each other. Since many people wanted to join, Trivedi sought out Troy Kroft, an art and media teacher, and Minjoo Park, a geometry and computer science teacher, to advise the club. 

When Park and Kroft started authorizing the club, they also established rules and regulations. 

“Even though the club is called Girls Who Code, it is open to both genders, even though the ratio of girls to boys so far is 10:1,” Park said.

The club’s main goals are to teach students how to code and encourage them to look into the field of computer science as adults.

Computer programming is a mostly male-dominated profession. The club encourages girls to learn coding and possibly pursue related careers. Since students are limited to the number of electives they can take per year, Girls Who Code is also a great way for pupils who can’t take computer programming classes but would still like to learn and participate. 

“We have about 11 students who come to the club on a regular basis or female. Hopefully they’ll encourage more students join the future. And again, we want to grow it so that we’re using sisterhood. And this notion of female leadership will hopefully encourage more females to pursue careers in the computer science field,” Park said

As of right now, the club has had several meetings during lunch every two weeks. The club uses Python, an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language.

At the meetings, the club members work on projects and activities to help them better their skills at computer programming. Most projects tend to be completed within a week. But going forward, the student captains plan on instructing long term projects, which the members can spend a couple weeks or even months.

“We haven’t really planned anything but we have a lot of ideas,” Serebrenik said. 

The club is working on a project that might be a website, an app, an animation, or some combination that will incorporate the theme “Evolution of the Depiction of Women in Disney-owned Films.”