The technology industry, in particular software development, has a diversity problem. Even the industry giants such as Apple and Facebook are struggling to get a more balanced workforce, and the guardian is no different, with women making up just 20% of the Digital department.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, aiming to raise the profile of women in tech and inspire a new generation of women to consider a career in technology.
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, and is often thought to be the first computer programmer for her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine - a mechanical general-purpose computer. Unfortunately the Analytical Engine was never finished and so Ada's algorithm, which was designed to calculate Bernoulli numbers, never quite made it into production. Impressively, even in the 1800s, working on an unfinished machine, Ada was already thinking about the possibilities of computing beyond number crunching, suggesting in her notes that a computer might be used to compose music 'of any degree of complexity.'
We celebrated the day at the Guardian by inviting 50 schoolgirls aged between 12 and 17 from schools around London to come to the office and learn about careers in technology and what we do in the digital department.
Sally Goble, the head of quality at the Guardian (and winter swimming champion) kicked off the day by talking about women who have inspired her. This was followed by some words from Aron Pilhofer - the Guardian’s chief digital officer - on the wide range of opportunities available in technology (not just engineering - product, UX, design, data and project management). We then split the students between two workshops - a coding workshop, and a UX, product and data workshop.
For the coding workshop, we got students to create their own Guardian front page. This was done using real data from the Guardian’s content API. At the start of the session we spent 10 minutes explaining what an API is, and why it’s useful to have one.
Next came the fun part! Beginning with a relatively dull page containing a few headlines from pre-selected topics, students made improvements in several stages:
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Basic modifications to the header, initially using the developer tools before modifying the HTML file
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Changing the content API queries to get headlines on topics of their choice
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Adding summary text and images to the page, using the information fetched from the content API
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Adding links - for this step students had to work out where to find the URL of a piece of content inside a content API response, then add it to the object that was being used to render their page
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Styling! We showed the students how to fiddle with the colours on the page and add some CSS3 animation effects
This was a lot to get through in just 1 hour, especially as for the majority of the students this was their first experience of programming of any kind. To avoid anyone getting stuck on something for too long we had a small army of Guardian staff helping out.
In the end, our fear that there was too much stuff to get through were unfounded - the students picked things up quickly, and soon had some great-looking pages. In the older group, some students even started adding fields of their choosing to the page by working out where in the content API response they could find the information they needed.
This is the second time we’ve run this workshop for Ada Lovelace day, and it’s gone down well with students on both occasions. Maybe you could make use of it too! All the skeleton code we used (as well as a ‘finished’ version of the page) is available on GitHub, together with the slides and details of what we talked about. You’ll need a content API key, which you can get from the Guardian open platform website. Unfortunately, high quality images aren’t available on the free developer tier of the API, so once you get to the point where you want to try this workshop out on some students, get in touch with us with your key and we’ll try and sort out getting it upgraded for you.
The second workshop was focused on the disciplines of product management, UX design and research, and data analysis - a wide set of skills to understand in just 1 hour! The girls got a (very speedy) overview of what these roles entail at the Guardian and were then given the chance to do our jobs for the day.
In small groups, the girls were asked to create a Guardian front page that appealed to young people. They started with idea generation and then began cutting, sticking and sketching to create their first paper prototype. They were encouraged to think mobile-first with the help of giant smartphone templates and many, many post-it notes.
The ideas were fantastically varied and very creative, from an app for learning and sharing dance routines, to a page for exploring international education, complete with an interactive rotating globe and even ads for plane tickets!
We had lots of great conversations about the way we work at the Guardian - iterating on ideas, ‘failing fast’ and not getting too attached to our ideas early in the design process (something everyone was able to relate to). The user testing phase came next - a few girls took on the role of ‘user’ and were assigned to different groups.
Each group conducted a mini user interview to learn about how their prototype appeared to a ‘real’ user and what did and didn’t work well. Lots of great, insightful questions were asked and the ‘users’ really got into character! This was all made more fun and realistic by the location of the workshop - our fantastic UX lab, complete with a one-way mirror and lots of devices.
Everyone was asked to consider three key metrics when designing their prototype and considering their user feedback: engagement, return visits and social shares. With these in mind, the groups came back together, chatted about their research findings and began finalising their prototype. The groups really took on board what their users had told them and were very astute in the way they iterated on their designs to address the key metrics.
Following some very professional presentations from each group, we cast votes based on which designs would perform best on each of the key metrics - much like hypothesis generation. We discussed how the next step would have been to obtain live data from our audience and conduct detailed analysis, before returning to the design and our user testing. It was great for everyone to see such a range of ideas, get a chance to present and explain their designs, and hopefully feel pleasantly surprised at what can be achieved in such a short period of time if you adopt this rapid, flexible way of working. Very impressive work from all!
Over lunch, the students heard from a number of women in the department about how they came to work in technology, and watched a shortened version of the film ‘CODE: Debugging the gender gap’. We then had an informal discussion about the film before heading off to the second round of workshops.
The day ended with a tour of the department, where the girls could meet and question someone from each team. This was a fun way to end the day and a nice way to show the reality of software development - not a group of wizards staring into the matrix, just some people sitting at desks making things together.
We had a great time! And we had positive feedback from the girls and their teachers as well. Ada Lovelace Day 2017 is already in the pipeline, so if you’ve got any suggestions or experiences off running your own days it would be great to hear from you. Alternatively, if you’d like to get in touch about using some of our resources or just getting some advice on running your own day then please do. You can find us on twitter @gdndevelopers.