We Hung Out With 20 Awesome Girls Acing Coding Lessons In Malta And This Is What We Learned

Coding can be a challenging skill to learn even without any additional obstacles, but for young girls and women the sad reality is that it’s much harder to break into this male-dominated industry.

With this in mind, Vodafone Malta hosted the #CodeLikeAGirl initiative to encourage girls aged 14-18 to broaden girls’ career choices and empower them with digital skills. Over a series of workshops with industry professionals, 40 young ladies learnt what goes on behind the screen and created their own websites in just a matter of days.

Lovin Malta was invited to check out the work being done during the workshops and here’s what we learnt.

There were several different motivations for joining the course; some wanted to hang out with their friends while learning something new, others were interested in the inner-workings of tools they use every single day. A small (but bluntly honest) group also spoke about the exciting prospect of making lots of money as a coder in future, which is a good motivator if we ever heard one.

Given the opportunity to create their own website centred around a topic of their choice, the girls created an incredibly varied array of choices, from movie review sites to online shopping stores, from websites that celebrate fandoms (groups of people who bond over dreamy stars or popular movies) to a page that helps you locate the perfect book for you.

Many of the websites were designed with modern day features in mind, such as adaptability to mobile devices and quick switching between portrait and landscape mode.

Learning everything from HTML to GitHub, the Maltese group joins the 1,000 girls across the world who will benefit from this initiative. In over 26 other countries, the #CodeLikeAGirl training will be making a huge impact in the world of technology, particularly when it comes to fixing the major gender imbalance.

Tag a friend who’d be proud to watch these girls code