Of course girls can code – our award proves it! Al-Huda High School juniors shattered stereotypes as they earned the College Board Advanced Placement Computer Science Female Diversity Award in the 2019 academic year for successfully attaining female student representation in the AP Computer Science Principles course.
This AP computer science course is an Al-Huda High School elective under the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). While it is an introductory course taught by Sister Farida Chowdhury, it covers a general overview of coding, data visualization, internet security and computation thinking.
“This class contains strong 21st century skills,” Sister Farida explains. “These days, coding is considered the new literacy.”
At the end of this course, students create an application using JavaScript as they showcase the different aspects of coding structures. Many students showcase their creativity in their apps, whether by graphic design, divergent user interface or utilizing Quran and duas into the application program itself.
“Girls are so much more reluctant to sign up for this class, so getting this award is encouraging to our females,” Farida states.
Among more than 18,000 secondary schools worldwide that offer AP courses, Al-Huda school is one of only 685 schools that have achieved this result, ma shaa Allah. Al-Huda school strives to close the gender gap in computer science. Computer science proves to be a promising field with a wide-range of job opportunities in any industry, flexible work-from-home options as well as the opportunity to embrace creativity to develop programs, websites, or apps that will help the Ummah at large, be’ithnillah.
