首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Why Girls Need to Switch on to Computing The garden is coming along nicely. Flowers spring into bloom in the herbaceous borders;
Why Girls Need to Switch on to Computing The garden is coming along nicely. Flowers spring into bloom in the herbaceous borders;
admin
2011-01-14
80
问题
Why Girls Need to Switch on to Computing
The garden is coming along nicely. Flowers spring into bloom in the herbaceous borders; mature trees are imported to cast their shade across the lawn. If only real life was this simple. For Bernadette Carverry and Jessica Allen, both 10, designing a garden takes a matter of minutes, not years. Later they might switch to designing a room, complete with plasma TV, or a bedroom, with lava lamps and pot plants. "I like computers," says Jessica, "you can design lots of things." "I liked it when we got to design clothes, and do interviews," says Bernadette. "It was like something you see in a magazine." The girls are part of an after-school computer club specifically tailored to get girls interested in what can often be an all-too-macho world of computer games and web design. Once a week they come along from their west London primary school to the ICT suite of the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, an ZZ to 16 maintained Catholic girls’ school, for an hour or so of girly fun at the keyboard. And it clearly is fun. Every computer station in the room is taken, either by the dozen visiting pupils, or by Sacred Heart students, and screens glow with bubble gum colours as girls run a rock concert, design a magazine or plan a fashion show. "The target is girls in years six and seven. It’s nice to be able to offer them something different," says head of ICT Niall Quinn. "They find it creative, and they are learning about ICT almost subliminally."
Behind the fun lie serious problems. Girls are perfectly happy to use computers as social aids, to chat with their friends or read e-mails, but they are not acquiring the heavyweight technological skills of using spreadsheets, constructing databases and designing web pages. Pre-school girls seem to embark on life just as interested as boys in computers, but somewhere along the way the rot sets in, so that only a mere fraction of the country’s computer graduates are female. Which means that an enormous number of skilled jobs are closed to girls when they leave school, and the e-skills industries, in turn, are finding it hard to get people of the right calibre.
This has serious implications for the country’s long-term technological capability. "Jobs are growing in the IT sector much faster than in the economy as a whole," says Brian McBride, former managing director of T-Mobile, "but there is an overall shortage of skills, and a basic gender imbalance in the industry. Only about twenty per cent of the workforce is female, and of the women who go into it, many leave to have their families and so on. Part of the problem is the IT and telecommunications image. People tend to think of geeky, long-haired boys playing war games!" Because of this, his former company and other corporate heavyweights, such as British Airways, IBM, the Ford Motor Company and Cisco, have thrown their muscle behind a new initiative to make computers more accessible and girl-friendly. The Department for Education and Skills came up with funding (£8.4m until 2007), companies donated time, advice and software, and the Computer Club for Girls, or CC4G as it is known, was launched in 2002, with a pilot programme funded by the South East England Development Agency. "We did some research among women’s groups and employers and we found that girls lost interest between about 9 and 13, and weren’t carrying on with IT in secondary school," says Melody Hermon, project manager with e-skills UK, the national skills council for the IT sector, which is running the programme.
So CC4G developed software for an after-school computer club—mainly in a startling shade of pink—which would allow girls to do all kinds of things dear to their hearts from designing digital dance moves to planning a sports event. On the way, so the thinking went, gills would become acquainted with programmes such as Photoshop, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel, and gain confidence in all aspects of using computers. The club would work for all kinds of schools, whether in rich or poor areas, and for all kinds of pupils, from the very bright to the academically challenged. Since the materials were tailored to the national curriculum it would also underpin the ICT curriculum that pupils were following in key stages two and three and help improve their performance. Most clubs would run after school, or in the lunch-hour, but, once enrolled, club members would also be free to access the website at home. So far 1,054 schools are registered, and some of them have 80 to 90 girls signed up to their clubs. "It’s picking up all the time," says Hermon. "We help and support schools to get started and encourage girls to return to the site out-of- hours. The whole thing has a non-school, club-type feel about it, with things that we give away, like pens and bags, which is what girls want. I have two daughters, so I know)"
The club is free to schools, and teachers get induction sessions, plus online and telephone support, and those who have been running pilot clubs report good results, with a positive impact on girls ICT achievements. Two thirds of girls in these clubs now say they are more likely to think about a career in ICT than before. "The club has made a profound difference in school to attitudes and aptitudes of girls in the ICT area," says Deborah Forster, head of Trinity School, Newbury, a specialist performing arts and technology college. "What it has helped do is reinforce the critical link between ICT, the arts, creativity and the full range of subjects. That’s the point: IT is an essential part of any career nowadays." "The beauty of the club is the way it combines a fun, real-life structure for learning IT-related skills with the development of a whole set of wider transferable skills, from project management to teamwork and evaluation. The girls absolutely love going to the club and have been its biggest advocate within school by spreading the word," says Jenny Wilkins, head of Skinners’ Company’s School for Girls, in east London.
*
选项
答案
Not Given
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/XdVO777K
本试题收录于:
雅思阅读题库雅思(IELTS)分类
0
雅思阅读
雅思(IELTS)
相关试题推荐
ThenumberofconnectionsCthatcanbemadethroughaswitchboardtowhichTtelephonesareconnectedisgivenbytheformulaC
TriangulargardenABCisredesignedbyincreasingthelengthofACby20percenttopointCanddecreasingthelengthofABby2
Thediagramrepresentsarectangulargarden.Theshadedregionsareplantedinflowers,andtheunshadedregionisawalk2feet
Mandyhasagardenthatisshapedlikearighttriangle,asshownbelow.SupposeMandycreatedanothergardenwiththesamedi
A、Thetechnologyismoreexpensivetodevelopthanthetechnologythatwasrequiredinelectroniccomputing.B、Thesearchforte
Theword"civilization"wasjustcomingintouseinthe18thcentury,inFrenchandinEnglish,whenconservativemenofletters
Afauxpas--whetherinsocialcirclesorinprivate--canbe______,asitfocusesusonourshortcomingsinwaysthatwouldoth
Theword"civilization"wasjustcomingintouseinthe18thcentury,inFrenchandinEnglish,whenconservativemenofletters
随机试题
(2012年)某上市公司2011年的营业额为15亿元,息税前利润为3.2亿元,公司的资产总额为48亿元,负债总额为32亿元,债务年利息额为1.2亿元。公司计划2012年对外筹资5亿元投资一个新项目。筹资安排初步确定增发新股筹资4亿元,从银行贷款1亿元。经过
下面通信方式_________不属于微波远距离通信。
关于OGTT试验,护士应该向患者做的卫生宣教不包括()。
女孩,10岁,发热15天,皮肤出现红斑,并伴有肘、膝关节游走性疼痛。入院辅助检查:ASO升高。现治愈出院,为防止复发,应至少肌内注射长效青霉素到
子宫的解剖下述哪项正确()。
回转窑用煤粉和重油为燃料,生产中存在火灾或爆炸危险,下列关于回转窑燃料使用的说法,不正确的是()。
后张法有粘结预应力施工中,孔道灌浆所使用的水泥浆强度不应小于()。
根据人力资本投资模型我们可以知道,在其他条件相同的情况下,读研究生时的年龄相对越小,则()。
In1922,EnglishmanHowardCarterfoundthetombofanEgyptiankingnamedTutankhamen.Somereportssaythatabovetheentrance
Pronouncingalanguageisaskill.Everynormalpersonisanexpertwiththeskillofpronouncinghisownlanguage,butfewpeop
最新回复
(
0
)