Guest Blogger: Devasena Prasad

Our guest blogger is Devasena Prasad. She is s a researcher in the software sustainability group. She has been working closely with Codefirst. Here is her post:

Code First:Girls is a not-for-profit organisation and is run by Entrepreneur First Community Interest Company and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. They offer free coding courses, events and hackathons for girls who want to learn more about the industry and meet other like-minded young women with their mission to get young women skilled up and pursuing careers in tech. They have worked with >500 young women and have a real impact on the careers the participants choose- from working in a tech start-up, to building their own start-up, to becoming junior software developers.

They expressed interest in collaborating with University of Southampton and started a chapter on campus in Fall 2014 in this mission. I (Devasena Inupakutika) am the Web Programming campus course instructor for this semester. The course consists of 2-hour classes weekly on Fridays for 20-30 students from October 24 to November 28.

Code First recruited and selected the participants for this programme. Currently we have 16-20 students from different departments at the University for this year. The aim is to create an open and inquisitive atmosphere to allow students to ask questions and get their heads around the course material. I have been teaching web programming basics, HTML and CSS scripting languages for the past 4 weeks. With the newly acquired skills, some of the students have already succeeded in creating their websites/ portfolios based on different stylesheets and formats introduced to them in class.

All the course material along with homework are hosted on an open-source version control system called GitHub. The aim is to cover JavaScript in next 2 sessions and we’ll be having an internal website design competition for which CodeFirst: Girls will provide a prize. Participants will be divided into teams. Each member of the winning team will receive a £20 Amazon voucher and will be featured on CodeFirst’s website. We’ll also pitch the entry against those from the other 11 CodeFirst courses around the U.K. for an overall Grand Prize of lunch with a cool female entrepreneur.