Voices: Why our girls are going to coding camp; USA Today, 6/16/14

Elizabeth Weise, USA Today; Voices: Why our girls are going to coding camp:

"Coding's like that. It's a skill, a language, and once you get the concept down, you can apply it elsewhere.

Too often, I sit in meetings or conferences and see something that involves programming come up, and half the people in the room just go blank. It's as if the discussion has moved into Swahili, behind an impenetrable barrier.

What's happening behind that barrier is increasingly the real stuff of civilization. It's what makes our phones work, keeps our schedules, amuses us while waiting in line and even runs the heart monitor on a sick friend.

Whatever our girls end up doing in life, they need to be able to follow those conversations. Maybe they'll become fluent and end up working for Alibaba in Beijing. Or maybe they'll just be able to get by.

Either way, we don't want a huge part of modern life to be utterly alien to them. For too many people, and especially too many girls, computers and the code that runs them make up a country they've never visited."