Top Five Places Where Women Can Learn to Code

Fancy programming your own video game but have absolutely no idea where to start? Feel like an outsider in the boys club that is the gaming industry? Want to help things to change? Here are some coding course aimed exclusively at women and other underrepresented people in the coding world.

Top five places to learn how to code

1. Ladies Learning Code is part of Learning Labs, an organisation which promotes computer education. They run in-person courses in 18 cities in Canada for around $50 per workshop. They cover a range of topics, including game design, video creation, HTML & CSS, digital drawing or WordPress, exclusively for women.

2. Black Girls Code is a fantastic organisation, focusing on two under-represented groups in the tech industry: women and people of color. They aim to offer “young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills in technology and computer programming at a time when they are naturally thinking about what they want to be when they grow up”. Workshops cost $35 per student and cover topics such as building games, mobile app development and JavaScript. Since launching in 2011, they have hosted multiple hackathons and learning expos across the US in large cities such as Chicago, Las Vegas, Brooklyn, Memphis and many more.

3. Skillcrush offer a three-month “career blueprint”, targeted towards empowering all kinds of people from a variety of different backgrounds, although the majority of their student population is made up of women. The career blueprint is designed to train and prepare students for a career as a web designer, web developer or freelance WordPress developer. They also provide individual classes, in subjects such as web design and jQuery, and a free ten-day bootcamp. Everything is online so Skillcrush can be accessed from anywhere around the world.

4. Code First: Girls is a UK-based outfit which holds free workshops for girls on university campuses. These last for two hours a week over four to six weeks. Beginners courses cover skills such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git and more front-end programming. Advanced/follow-on courses include Python or Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Heroku and other frameworks (back-end programming). Code First: Girls also offer a hack school (a long-term summer program) and host career talks for women interested in getting into the tech industry.

5. Codebar.io is also UK-only. They hold free weekly coding workshops in London, Brighton and Cambridge, for those under-represented in the tech industry, with a focus on women and LGBTQ communities. The workshops cover HMTL and CCS, JavaScript, and Ruby or Python. They also have free learning material available online, covering HTML, Version Control, JavaScript and Ruby.

If you have any experiences learning code please share!