Just weeks after releasing its first diversity report and calling for more women to get into computer science, Google's backing that up with a new effort aimed at getting more girls to code. Today the company announced a new program called Made with Code that includes a mix of coding projects, partnerships with youth organizations, and $50 million in funding Google says will help get more females involved in the field of computer science.
Make GIFs or 3D printed bracelets
Some of the early coding projects include a 3D printed bracelet, an animated GIF-maker, 2D avatar maker, music composer, and a selfie styler that lets you put various props over a photo. All of those are done through Google's Blockly visual programming language, which the company introduced two years ago, and which can be found in other introductory code-training tools like Code.org. Google's also partnering with nonprofit Girls Who Code, which runs summer coding courses.
"Nowadays, coding isn't just a skill useful for working at a tech company; engineering isn't just for engineers. Interior design. Medicine. Architecture. Music. No matter what a girl dreams of doing, learning how to code will help her get there," YouTube's CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote in a post announcing the project. "Their future — our future — is made with code."
The new program comes three weeks after Google released the first of what's expected to be annual diversity reports of its employees. In it, the company said its worldwide workforce was 70 percent male, and 61 percent white, which it said was "miles" away from where it wanted to be. Additional diversity reports have since been released by LinkedIn and Yahoo with similar results and conclusions, all noting that disparities of female employees and certain minority groups were a reality, but one that could be changed.