The tenor of at least one week 6 classroom has changed dramatically, I’m sure the others have, too – it’s go time. Technically, the substantial portion of their projects is supposed to be done tomorrow afternoon. Monday is testing and Tuesday lunch is code freeze – no more development after that. In reality, very little testing will get done on most projects – they’ll still be working hard just to finish.

And I do mean hard. When I got to the room this afternoon, the girls had just come back from a panel with women senior technical workers, and rather than the usual ten minutes of chatting, going to the bathroom, getting a drink and so on, they sat right down, put their earbuds in, and got to work.

The groups are in drastically different places. One group has essentially finished their project, and are working on additional features. Another group had an idea that was too big (they resisted suggestions to pare it down), they weren’t able to make the progress they hoped for, and they are in a bind right now. There is still a way forward for them, but their site will be static, rather than as interactive as they’d hoped. It’ll be more of a storyboard than an actual working site.

A third group has an interesting story, and it’s characteristically GIrls Who Code, and exactly what we hope for. Their project is done except for art and text. The art they are doing is simply amazing, and highly detailed. It is of the anime style, and really quite beautiful. The idea they have is to create a visual novel (story) of sorts. It takes a whole lot of effort to code something like that up, so they asked the instructors for some ideas. One of them suggested using Ren’Py to make the whole thing work. They looked at the site, and decided that there was too much reading (TL;DR), and they needed and easier way. So they started looking, but didn’t find anything else even close to what they wanted. To their credit, the went back learned how to use this new set of tools, and now are closing in on a final product. This is exactly what GWC is designed to do: instill in the girls that they don’t have to know how to do something; they can just get in there, learn it, and use it. They went from being “I don’t know how to do this” stuck to “I don’t know how to do this, I guess I’ll just learn it. Go.”