Moira Hardek, GitHub’s Senior Director of Education, believes that building a diverse tech workforce begins with engaging children early and facilitating them in coding using core concepts of the discipline. Getty Images / istockphoto
As GitHub’s Senior Director of Education, Moira Hardek outlines ideas and strategies to get students excited and connected to the world of computer science and coding.
GitHub recently announced that teachers who join the GitHub Global Campus and use the GitHub Classroom are now getting free Access to CodespacesGitHub Integrated Development Environment. In addition, GitHub has also announced plans to host two people in person graduation events This month.
Hardek said about 1.9 million students are active on the GitHub education platform.
“What’s particularly game-changing for Codespaces in education is how the development environment is set up,” Hardick said. “So for anyone who has tried programming as a student or has tried to teach, setting up this development environment can take minutes, it can take hours, and it can completely disrupt someone’s computer science experience and shift them to where you start writing grammar.”
In a recent conversation with ZDNet, Moira spoke about what made her interested in technology, the opportunities to offer tech education experiences to students, the sense of community within GitHub, and misconceptions and opportunities in tech education.
Below is our interview. Condensed and edited.
What opened the door to work in technology?
Moira Hardick: I have always been surrounded by strong female role models. In fact, my high school I attended was the largest Catholic high school for girls in the world. So you can imagine that I got a lot of empowerment but I was very surprised and disappointed when I got into the industry and it looked a lot different from the real positive message I got.
Early in my career, I often realized that I was the only woman in the room when it came to artwork, and I also worked a lot on the services side of technology. When I looked around the room, when I looked around at my not-so-great experiences, I wanted to change the look of the room, and I wanted Focus on diversity. So I began to drift this way into education.
Transition from an institutional position to an advocate for technical education
MH: When I went to work at Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics retailer in the world at the time, we had some really bright leaders. There was a very innovative CEO at the time by the name of Brad Anderson. I’m still a big fan of it.
I thought his approach—and nobody really thinks about this in consumer electronics—was really more anthropological. He has always spoken about our customers, our users, and the impact we have on their lives. It really helped shape me into my youth.
I went to our CEO and said “I really want to work on diversity in our services and technology.” And you wouldn’t know, they backed me up and said “Okay, great. We’re going to give you some resources to help bring in a more diverse workforce.”
I got shot in the foot there because, if I remember correctly, when I was in college, I was like one of three girls in computer science class. So when I started going to colleges looking for women to work in technology, there were as few as there were when I was in school.
And that’s when I really realized that we have to go through the pipeline and start changing these perceptions about computer science and who it is and not very early in elementary and high school, through college.
What is a good way to help children see themselves in technology?
MH: The one thing that has always puzzled me about how to teach technology is that we start programming a lot. … I like to ask this question to every developer I work with: “Hey, can you do any of these things that you are doing today if you don’t know what FTP is?” They are like “no”.
and me [ask] “Can you do any of the work today if you don’t know how your files and subdirectories work [work]? “
Then you look around and ask, “Where do we teach these basics and these basics to our students?” We don’t do that anywhere else. In mathematics, we don’t jump to long division, we start with numbers. Then counting, then addition, then subtraction.
The notation is long division. And there’s a lot that comes before that. Slang, Fundamentals of Hardware. And to be honest, this is not the most exciting topic. Our teachers are really challenged to make it fun and engaging. But I think there’s a lot that comes before programming.
And yes, we inadvertently discourage students and turn them off very early on by starting them with perhaps a more advanced topic.
Misconceptions about education and technology jobs
MH: I’d actually like to make a comparison now that it’s like going to medical school. And our job is to have first-year medical students. So you need to learn the basics of the body…but then you start delving into your specialties. Are you going to be a cardiologist, are you going to be an oncologist?
The same thing happens in technology. Are you going to go full stackare you going end of introductionYou are cyber securityAre you a data engineer?
I think treating computer science as if it were just one nugget of content and subject matter was one of the biggest mistakes, in general, made by the educational community in teaching computer science.
The value of community building in computer science
MH: When we bring a community together and start talking to each other, that’s where we really start to demystify all of these pieces. And I think the community is where we find our questions and our solutions.
Obviously we live in an incredibly virtual digital world, and especially with things like Global Campus and Codespaces, it’s all about accessibility. Everyone can access, whether you’re on your own device or not.
When the pandemic first started, there were initially a lot of levers that we had to pull - and we’ve been blessed with that a lot - to keep the community as connected and cohesive as possible during the pandemic with all these physical barriers.
But of course, at some point, we are human. We crave connection, we crave connection outside the digital realm… You can feel nervous and you can feel nervous, but what resulted was magical, everyone leaned on each other for support. How humanity suddenly overcame everything else and we were all in this together, globally.
And we saw it in the first ever virtual graduation GitHub education was done in 2020. Now it’s a staple of what we do, and I think it’s probably the most beautiful example of our community that you can see in one place.
What’s really interesting about this is that the first year we did this we found out that over a third of the withdrawal requests that were sent [to request inclusion in the graduation] It was for the student First withdrawal request. So graduation motivated students to learn a very advanced skill.
We see: How to build a coding portfolio
One of the most dangerous accomplishments is integrating a pull request into GitHub, and that’s the first big step you can take. We found that events like [graduation] Give our students the courage and confidence to move forward and try new things within the platform.
But what made it even more magical, was that the students, especially those who made these pull requests for the first time, were the other students helping fix the pull requests for the students who were doing it for the first time. It does not matter which region they belong to. This was happening globally around the world.
This year, in 2022, when we brought up the original repository with the opening brief, it was written in English. The students began translating the abstract so they could share it. It has now been translated into 22 different languages to ensure that as many students as possible can access the virtual graduation, all done by the students themselves for their community.