Sophomores host coding workshop for girls at Easttown Library

By Isabelle Emmanuel, Staff Reporter

Sophomores Pavithra Aju Nair, Arushi Vignesh and Penelope Valenti are teaching middle school girls about coding through their workshop, Magenta Programmers. Vignesh got the idea for the workshop after recognizing women’s underrepresentation in STEM fields.

“Throughout middle school, I attended lots of programming courses and workshops. I found that the majority (of the attendees) were always boys with a couple girls here and there. I thought maybe we should start a workshop designed to get girls motivated to go into technology,” Vignesh said.

Although the class is now held monthly at the Easttown Library, Magenta Programmers did not always have the luxury of an in-person location. They started teaching over Zoom calls during the pandemic, only gaining access to rooms at the library in June of 2021.

“Since we started from scratch, it was hard to go through all the founding steps, determine how we would teach and where we were going,” Nair said. “It took a while of emailing people to find that the Easttown Library was willing to do it with us and some collaborating with the librarian so we could get on the schedule.”

Teaching a younger audience has proved to be a struggle that the girls have learned how to combat.

“Another challenging part is the fifth and sixth graders. Back when we were fifth and sixth graders, we didn’t pay attention that well. It was hard to hone in and focus,” Nair said. “We had to be able to time out how long we can teach and how long we should do activities. We usually (hosted) two-hour classes, so we had to separate that into how much time teaching them and the rest being implementation of what they’ve learned.”

Through the hardships, the members continue to love teaching girls to code because of the new ideas and information they are able to pass on.

“My favorite part of teaching these kids is the different experience levels and how they show off what they’ve learned,” Nair said. “It’s cool to see how someone reacts when they finally create a project that they didn’t know anything about at first, but with the help and support they’ve gained they were able to create actual content.”

The Magenta Programmers workshops had a profound effect on a seventh grader from T/E Middle School, Tvisha Jani. Jani has attended workshops since 2021 and feels the classes are inspiring and helpful for young girls.

“The founders are empowering us because they’re showing us possibilities for women in STEM, and they’re doing it in a fun way so we get more interested in it,” Jani said. “Women are not usually seen as computer programmers or in the science field, so the fact that we see these people that are women help us is really cool because we see what they accomplish and realize we can do it too.”

Isabelle Emmanuel can be reached at [email protected].