Girls get IT

In this article, we describe high school promotional visits and campus workshops developed to encourage female junior high school students to consider a career in information technology. The students were exposed to programming concepts and activities in a manner that made such content enjoyable and relatively easy to understand and were given pre and post workshop questionnaires. Students perceived programming as simpler and themselves as being more capable after attending these workshops. The article demonstrates the potential for such workshops to address aspects of perceived difficulty and of self-perceptions in ability to master such content.