Lincoln group teaching young girls how to code

Instead of spending their Sunday afternoon hanging out with friends, this group of girls gets together to learn how to code.

“We just write lines of code that make the website run and if there’s a problem we have to rewrite the lines of code,” said sixth grader Brynn Nicholaus.

The group is called Girls Code Lincoln, which started at Girls Who Code.

It’s a national organization with more than 50,000 clubs across the United States, including a chapter here in Lincoln, all aimed at closing the gender gap in technology.

Girls range in age from fourth grade to high school and meet every Sunday at Fuse Coworking in the Haymarket.

The group is run entirely by volunteers, most of whom work in technology related fields, and hope to inspire these young coders to pursue careers in stem related fields.

“Usually when you think of a computer programmer you think of somebody sitting in a dark basement on a black computer screen and that’s all they do all day and it just sounds really boring. We’re also trying to make technology fun by showing them they can be creative they can animate and exposing them to fields like graphic design and video game design,” said Aakriti Agrawal, the director of clue development for the Lincoln chapter of Girls Who Code.

Every semester the group works on different project- everything from building their own websites to programming hardware.

For girls like high school sophomore Vanessa McCue the group has given her the opportunity to explore a field she didn’t have access too.

“There’s a lack of females in programming in general so there should be more girls because girl power.”

McCue and the others are hoping to inspire other girls to join and prove the future of technology lies in girl power.