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Step Inside This Teen Girls' Hackathon, Where Budding Coders Get Their Start

This article is more than 8 years old.

High school sophomore Teja Deonarine wants to talk to sharks. Senior Gianni Small wants to build a better eBay . And seventh-grader Bronwyn Chochinov wants to help girls express themselves through fashion.

These girls are learning to code.

The three came together at a New York hackathon event, where they made a short video. Shooting scenes on smartphones, editing the video, and tweaking lines of code in javascript was all part of the movie-making process, using a new app called Vidcode.

“We wanted to use video as a medium to get girls excited,” says Allie Diracles, co-founder of the app.

The girls used code to add effects to their videos—making colors explode, graphics fire and scenes pixillate. Diracles says she created the app so teens could connect with code “outside of gaming,” but still in a playful, creative way.

Vidcode launched in March, and uses common coding language javascript. It operates with a limited vocabulary, so there are just a few commands to learn. More experienced coders can write lines of code and see effects change in the video in real-time. Novices can drop and drag effects into the video screen, and the line of code that matches their actions appears automatically in the script—introducing JavaScript programming in a friendly way.

Patricia Zablah, a 28-year-old tech program manager and one of the mentors who helped the girls with their code, says that combination of coding and seeing a finished product is important.

“Pride is not a gendered feeling,” Zablah says. “You don’t have to choose: hanging out with girls, or this.”

Silicon Valley has recently made headlines, not because there are so few women in tech, but because they’re not always welcome. According to Women Who Code, women working in tech leave their jobs at twice the rate of their male counterparts—often abandoning the field entirely when they go.

At the hackathon, as the girls are putting the finishing touches on their videos, Deonarine, the aspiring marine biologist, tells me it was her mother who encouraged her to pursue coding.

“At first I didn’t like it,” Deonarine said. “What does coding have to do with marine biology? But then I realized you can build software.”

She’d like to create a program to communicate with sharks. “Sharks are the second most intelligent marine life,” she says, her voice growing animated. She thinks there’s a lot to be learned from the mighty fishes lurking in the depths of the oceans, and she'd like to examine the sounds and tones sharks use—by coding new software, of course.

You can see all of the videos the girls’ teams created here, on Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls site.