Junior Bhavana Katta, freshman Veda Ganesan and freshman Hansika Kantheti started a new Girls Who Code club last week, with its goal to get more girls interested in technology and coding. 

The school previously had a Girls Who Code club, but due to the founders graduating, it was put on pause two years ago. Then this month, three students came together to revive the club.

“There’s more girls that are interested in coding,” Katta said. “and since there’s a new robotics club, too, it would help with it, since robotics needs programming.”

The three co-presidents decided that even though the founding member, Neha Yawalker, had left, there was still a reason to keep the club going. 

“The original goal was to close the gender gap in technology and coding,” Ganesan said. “I wanted to start a club for like-minded girls to get together and share ideas. While doing so, we are making an impact and having fun.”

The club has many goals for its future here, including a main project of creating a website over the course of the school year. Later, they plan to add HTML, which is a markup language, and CSS, which works with design, onto the website. 

“Our final project is the website,” Ganesan said. “Each meeting, we add a different element. So our first meeting will be planning and research. And then we have our wireframe and the skeleton, then we slowly add elements.”

In addition to the website, the students have plans to start the Lamar Outreach, a workshop about coding,  in order to get middle schoolers interested. This was directly inspired by the original founder, who originally sparked Kantheti’s interest in the club. 

“We’re gonna have some main projects like we might be going to Lamar,” Kantheti said. “When I was in sixth grade, the high schoolers here who had opened the club before, they came to Lamar.” 

The students, following the example of their role models, plan to have this club and its purpose go on for many years. 

“We’re kind of rebooting or renewing it essentially,” Ganesan said. “We both wanted to keep this tradition of Girls Who Code in Marcus going.”