Grade 5 St. Dunstan Catholic School student Julius Fong wants to be a racecar driver or astronaut.

If neither of those career choices takes off, the Scarborough student would like to develop racing video games, which is something he enjoys playing today.

“I’ll give players a full racing experience,” he said.

Fong was one of about 70 Toronto Catholic District School Board students from three schools at an event put on by Toronto-based Hackergal, a non-profit organization with a mission to inspire girls to participate in coding. The Dec. 13 event held at Artscape Daniels Launchpad had students take part in an hour of coding, learn about developing games and discover the many ways technology helps people.

Julius already loves technology.

“It’s a much easier way to communicate with people, it can teach my generation a whole bunch of stuff from the past and it can really help humanity in the future and the present,” he said. He said technology can make many tasks easier.

“Technology is the best thing that ever happened to this world other than pop,” he said.

Boys who are already interested in technology and careers in technology play a role in encouraging their female counterparts to consider the field, said Hackergal founder and executive director Lucy Ho. That’s one of the reasons why the organization, in conjunction with the school board’s Computer Science Education Week, hosted an event for both boys and girls. The event also had support from Toronto game developer Snowman and Apple Canada, which provided iPads for all the participants to use during the event.

Julius’s classmate Arushi Gomes admits she enjoys using computers and iPads for homework and recreation, but she’s never considered a career in technology.

“I haven’t really tried to code that much, but so far I like it,” she said after trying her hand at coding on Apple’s Swift Playgrounds. “It’s very interesting to experience how it all works.”

Participants learned that only about 22 per cent of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce is female, something which Hackergal aims to change.

The organization says there are a number of reasons why so few women are in the field, including a perception that they’re not as good at it. That perception prohibits women from pursuing post-secondary STEM programs and this leads to minimal female representation in the workforce. The end result is that girls have few examples of women they can aspire to be like.

The charity was founded about four years ago and works with teachers across Canada to provide them the tools and knowledge to introduce coding to girls.

Founder Ho said the organization started with a class of 30 students in Toronto, and now supports classrooms in Canada’s 10 provinces, reaching 5,000 girls at each of their biannual hackathon events.

“We’ve seen tremendous change in the schools that we work with. We’ve grown across Canada,” she said.

Hackergal was a passion project for Ho, who found herself being one of few women working in the tech sector, and wanting to change that.

“I thought it was important that this is a conversation we need to bring to the table. How do we inspire more girls to be the next leaders in Canada and to make a difference in technology and make meaningful impact,” she said.

“Females bring a different perspective and that’s important when you’re building technology, building innovation.”

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She added that men and women will need to work together to address the gender gap.

“We’re excited to host this as an opportunity to raise awareness about the gender gap and to involve boys in the conversation. Having them understand what the gender gap means and what they can do as students to support a learning experience for girls and to be part of the conversation to support the girls in the classrooms.”

Grade 6 teacher Michael Soraine, from North York’s St. John XXIII Catholic School, who brought his class to the event, said his students learned new skills. When working on school computers, the work they do is more basic.

“Hopefully, the students will gravitate to this and it will open up some avenues for them in the future. Hopefully, they’ll make use of this opportunity,” he said.