[snikolov]

I agree that that the boys and videogames thing is a bit of a misconception. But rather than attacking that misconception, we should be asking how poeple might come to have such misconceptions and how we can correct them. My takeaway is that many people (including males like me) don't see computer science and programming as the creative, empowering thing that it is. That is, until they start doing it. How can we make people see that? I remember when I was at Stuy (the school in the article), upper level courses were advertised by showing all these enticing projects that past students did. It made me super excited to take the graphics course, for example, because I knew I'd get to create a system for making awesome 3d animations, basically from scratch. But I didn't "get it" until I took the intro course on a whim (it wasn't required back then).

So maybe we need to better advertise all the creative potential of programming in a variety of fields. I know if you had told high school freshman me about using programming to make websites, I would not have cared one bit. But if you showed me how I could make generative art and music or poetry or 3d graphics, I would've been very excited.