Free Short Programming Courses for Current Female Students

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What is the Action?

Promote and/or offer free programming courses to existing non-computing female students.

Quick Facts to Support this Action

These courses can provide a great exposure to programming, as well as to trainers who can become computing role models.

Ways to Implement this Action

A collaboration with a social enterprise provider of coding courses might be the most straightforward way to allow existing university students to learn to code for free. An example of a provider is CodeFirstGirls, who only offer free trainer-led courses to their female members.

Alternatively, set up an initiative at the university where free coding courses can be organised.

Free online introductory computing courses are readily available at universities such as, for instance, Harvard or Stanford. These can be attended by anyone online. While the Harvard offers self-paced free courses, Standford has a teacher-led program set for several weeks, with mandatory attendance online. If implementing at another institution, access can be restricted, for instance, allowing to participate if you are a female student only, or by those with strong motivation etc.

Evaluation Approach

To get an idea on how the course is being perceived is to keep track on students’ engagement, for instance, in forum discussions, and their assignment submission and performance.

Get feedback from students who attended the free coding course, about their career aspirations and/or impressions from programming. Additionally, where possible, track numbers of those students who changed their majors to computer science following the offered course.

Example of questions that can be asked in a feedback survey (UCL Resource):

  • Rate your overall experience of the course (from very good to very poor)
  • How likely are you to recommend this course to a friend/colleague? (from very likely to very unlikely)
  • How did this course develop you professionally?
  • What will you do differently now you’ve attended the course?
  • As a result of taking this course, how likely are you to…..? (include some of the learning outcomes that are relevant)

CodeFirstGirls. About Us. Retrieved from https://codefirstgirls.com/about-us/

McKeever, S. & Lillis, D. (2021). Addressing the Recruitment and Retention of Female Students in Computer Science at Third Level. Retrieved 09/03/2025 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.06090

Piech, C., Malik, A., Jue, K., & Sahami, M. (2021, March). Code in place: Online section leading for scalable human-centered learning. In Proceedings of the 52nd acm technical symposium on computer science education (pp. 973-979).

Free computing courses at Harvard: https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/programming.

Free intro-coding course from Stanford:https://codeinplace.stanford.edu/