Meet Laura Willson, An Outstanding Young Girl Who Codes

Meet Laura Willson, a promising student at Saint Jean Baptiste High School and the middle child of eight. Her interest for coding began this past summer when she attended the Girls Who Code Program in NYC for eight weeks. While attending the program, she learned about different programming languages such as Scratch, Python, HTML, C, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, and JQuery Mobile. She also learned how to program an arduino. For her final project, she managed to program an alarm clock on an arduino, which was just a prototype.

Overall, the Girls Who Code Program taught Laura a lot about coding such as, frustration is your best friend, which means that even if you are frustrated with the result of the program don’t give up. Programming languages don’t work on the first try like you want them to.

At the GWC Program, Laura met so many different professionals and learned how to communicate with them. She was lucky enough to meet the Founder and CEO of the Girls Who Code Program, Reshma Saujani. Laura has inspired so many other young women to take an interest in Computer Science. On her personal blog Laura says:

It is really important to address the gender gap at a young age by teaching girls how to code. After the GWC Program, I made a Girls Who Code club in my school to give girls in my school the opportunity to learn how to code. More women are needed in the Computer Science field. Only 26% of the Computer Science field is women. I am proud to be a girl who codes!

Laura was recently selected to attend CodeNow’s three day workshop on October 4th, 5th, and 18th at Infor. Infor is a company that specializes in software. CodeNow is a coding program that teaches high school students how to program and gives exposure to tech companies.