Anna & Elsa, stars of Disney's Frozen, inspire girls to take up coding
Girls are being encouraged to enter the hitherto male-dominated world of computer coding with the unlikely guidance of Disney’s animated hit Frozen.
Anna & Elsa have been enlisted by Code.org, a body dedicated to supporting computer science teaching in schools and boosting diversity, to inspire more young girls to enter the profession.
This will see the animated heroines front a coding tutorial to instruct students how to build snowflakes, ice fractals and skating sequences using Blocky – a simple visual learning tool that allows commands to be entered by dragging and dropping pre-written blocks of code.
Mona Akmal, director of product at Code.org, said: “It's not just about putting programs in front of girls. It's about making it a foundational part of learning."
A gender imbalance in schools sees women receive just 13 per cent of computer science degrees, a key contributory factor to a shortage of software engineers with estimates suggesting that in the US alone there will be 1m unfilled computing jobs by 2020.