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‘Rails Girls’, a worldwide movement that aims to bridge the gender divide in technology and teach women how to code, is back to Galway for a third year edition. The free weekend workshop will let females of all ages into the world of building web applications and software services.

Funded by NUI Galway’s Insight Centre for Data Analytics' Outreach Programme, ‘Rails Girls’ will take place from 27-28 June at Insight in the Dangan IDA Business Park.

The organisers comprise of young female IT engineers and researchers involved in local third-level colleges, businesses, schools and volunteer digital makers’ clubs such as CoderDojo and 091Labs. The workshop will use 'Ruby on Rails', a powerful web application framework for the Ruby programming language. No prior knowledge of programming is required and is suitable for absolute beginners to computer coding.

Myriam Leggieri, PhD student with Insight at NUI Galway and founder of the Rails Girls Galway chapter, said: “There are stereotypes in our society that lead us to imagine programming as a boring, too complicated, isolated activity. We want to demonstrate that it can be a social, creative and fun job. The country desperately needs a generation of young coders of both sexes to help lay the foundations of a ‘Knowledge Economy’ and create the jobs for a sustainable future. But there is, in particular, a dire shortage of female IT developers in Ireland and across the world as well as in the professions of science, technology, engineering and maths professions generally. There is no reason why this should be the case except for lack of exposure to such environments. Events such as 'Rails Girls' directly address this issue and empower girls to take the first step in learning these in-demand skills and acquiring the tools to conquer one of the last great frontiers of science, namely the World Wide Web.”

The first event, launched by Linda Liukas and Karri Saarinen, was held in Helsinki in 2010 and is a worldwide phenomena.

Further information and application forms are available at www.railsgirls.com/galway. The closing date for applications is Sunday, 31 May. There are a limited amount of places available so early registration is recommended.

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