Status of Women committee  A lot of our youth are experiencing the road map of our programs. For example, we have a young woman named Chloe. She entered our road map through being a volunteer for the program girls learning code. Girls learning code is for 9- to 12-year-olds. She signed up to be a mentor and knew nothing about code at all.

Status of Women committee  They are different. Something we notice when really assessing how technology education is taught in your traditional classroom is that there is a lack of opportunity to take advantage of providing a bigger social and collaborative learning environment. When we think of computer science, we think of a classroom set up as rows of computers and a teacher at the front of the room.

Status of Women committee  This is an interesting question. When we work towards our teachers learning code program, the goal is to teach teachers how to introduce computational thinking to those beyond the usual suspects, those beyond the youth who would be naturally inclined to be interested in areas of STEM.

Status of Women committee  Specifically, a big part of our program for high school girls goes beyond helping them develop computational skills. A great deal of it involves building that community where these girls can connect. We also bring them to conferences, and we get them involved with developing technologies through some of our partnering organizations.

Status of Women committee  Yes, we have partnerships. For example, we have partnerships with Google where Google will run some sort of event specifically for teen girls. They are after-school and weekend events, to accommodate high school girls' schedules. So yes, we partner with organizations.

Status of Women committee  We address this in the design process. We ensure that when we're designing technology education we are considering all sorts of diversity in thought at the table, and yes, that also means that women are part of that design process, our instructors and our mentors. We ensure there's a good distribution of diversity, gender diversity within that, and we also ensure that in the events we bring these girls to or that they get exposed to there is female representation within the STEM leaders they are learning from.

Status of Women committee  Truthfully, a lot of it has been word of mouth. We do active outreach to specific communities that we feel are significantly marginalized and underserved. That could be a lower income area, an area that has been deemed by census data to have a higher population of at-risk youth.

Status of Women committee  Yes. We have met with a couple of ministries of education to start the conversation on how we can address this. We've met with the ministry of education in Ontario to start moving towards that, so we're starting the process.

Status of Women committee  I mentioned earlier that the drop-off rate is quite high—it's 25%—for adult women leaving areas of STEM due to experiencing sexism and unwelcoming workplace environments. We are seeing a lot of those women getting involved in mentorship programs, including ours. We have many organizations that are huge supporters of our organization almost solely to have their staff become active as mentors for these young girls and for these young people.

Status of Women committee  Sure. We know that to keep technology education only at the curricular level is not enough, quite frankly. At Canada Learning Code, we believe strongly in getting technology education into schools at an early age. With all of our experiences teaching thousands of youth across our nation to code, we are taking all of our very hard lessons learned, packaging them up, and providing educators with content and with in-school workshop training on professional development days to really help teachers feel confident.

Status of Women committee  We're very aware that to solve this issue it's going to be a multipronged approach. Something that we are currently focusing on is to try to not allow the lack of, say, Internet connection or computing equipment to be a barrier to teaching computational thinking. Our team is faced with the huge task of being very aware of what the current situation is and getting very creative in designing solutions, so that a teacher who has a classroom with none of these resources can still introduce computational thinking in some way.

Status of Women committee  Currently we're just starting to dig our claws deep into K-to-12 computer science frameworks in various provinces. We're looking to map a lot of our education design to those frameworks. This way, as an educator adopts this tweak in the curriculum, it is more easily digestible. It will also ensure that we have thoroughly thought of everything that needs to be met within the curriculum and designed for that.

Status of Women committee  Sure. We know that the interest in STEM for young girls drops off at around 12 to 13 years of age, which is a significant problem. There seems to be a lot of interest from girls in areas of STEM leading up to that age and then there's this drop-off that happens. Something that we currently have with our programs, which we'd like to see more of, is more technology education experiences, along with a community for those girls between the ages of 13 to 17 to continue to nourish and support their interests as they look to apply to post-secondary institutions in areas of STEM.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for having me here today on behalf of Canada Learning Code, and please note that I'll be happy to answer any questions following my statement. As the youth programming director of Canada Learning Code, I have the great privilege of working with my team to develop and provide accessible technology education experiences for the youth of our nation, particularly young girls.