6th grade students in Sarah Cuje's science enrichment class at Gunning Bedford Middle School in Delaware City chatted live with Microsoft founder Bill Gates today.
The class won the half hour video chat as part of computer science website Code.org’s Hour of Code movement that seeks to expose 100 million students to at least one hour of computer science during this week’s National Computer Science Education Week.
Cuje registered her class for the program and was entered into a contest for a live chat with an expert - who turned out to be Gates.
Gunning Bedford students asked Gates if he ever messed up on a big project and if so, how he recovered.
Gates related a tale from Microsoft's early days and problems with the shipping of the Windows operating system and fitting it into the limits of the machine at the time - saying the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and having to overcome drastically altering the way Microsoft was run helped eventually lead to later success.
"It was a setback," he said over a video chat session. "It was a case where the company had to reconsider the whole way we did things. But in the end we came out of it smarter."
Cuje hopes the Q&A session with such a prominent figure will spark interest in the STEM-related field and the job opportunities it presents, and "to try and inspire students to consider computer science as a possible career path."
According to code.org stats, Delaware presently has almost 3500 open computing jobs - growing at a rate nearly 6 times the state average - while only 11 schools teach computer science courses, with no teacher certification pathways or curriculum standards.
The First State also remains one of 25 states nationwide where high school students cannot earn credits toward graduation from computer science classes.
"Out of all the STEM jobs," Cuje added, "60% are related to computer science however 2% are exposed during their time at school."
And of that small number, only 14% of women - and only 8% of minorities - are represented in the field.
Though data on minority participation was unavailable at the time, the Hour of Code project is seeing participation split roughly down the middle of gender lines (51% male to 49% female), and is utilizing characters from recent Disney hit film Frozen in one of their interactive tutorials to engage a wider audience.
When asked during the Q&A about fostering more young women to major in computer science, Gates said its certainly not an issue of ability, and that perhaps changes in social perceptions would alter that course.
"Somehow we're intimidating them or setting some kind of social expectation that's discouraging," he said adding that drop-out rates from the curriculum rise as they advance in their education.
"We have to overcome those [negative] stereotypes, we have to encourage women to make sure they understand the opportunity," Gates said. "Many professions, like law and business and medicine, have made progress so its too bad that computer science is lagging behind."