When it comes to programming, the subject can be especially intimidating for students with no prior programming experience. The concepts look like they have been presented in a different language, and it appears as if it is rocket science to someone who has never seen code before. One of the barriers to learning programming is initial intimidation. There is an assumption circulated around programming that you must be a genius or have a strong math foundation before learning to program. In reality, many people do not know what programming is before stepping into the field, or they may have a very general idea of what programming is, but they do not know all the accessories that are incorporated with the subject such as computational theory, or data analysis. If programming was marketed to students using a different approach, I feel there may be more of an interest, especially for women.

As a whole, programming is seen as something that is too difficult to learn. If small programming workshops were catered to high school students, the subject could be seen as less intimidating, and spark interest in younger students. By giving them the bigger picture, students would be more inclined to have an interest in the subject. In our learning design, we want to start off with a motivation to demonstrate to students how they may make use of this useful skill. The more adolescents are exposed to the subject, the less they are likely to believe that the subject is too difficult to learn.

Some types of learners to cater to in an asynchronous programming workshop are students with a loss of hearing or students with color blindness. To ensure these students feel included in the learning environment, it would be critical to choose videos with closed captions and possibly include PDFs with detailed instructions on the lessons. For students with color blindness, there is usually a way to change the color scheme in your coding environment so the syntax would be more visible, and we could include a short tutorial on how to do this exactly. For students without a laptop, it would be feasible to include downloadable PDFs, and since our workshop is mainly introducing programming concepts, the student would be able to try the activities at their own convenience.