Girls develop skills and strength in NDP’s tech program

Thanks to one of the less glamorous aspects of coding, Anika Aracan has developed a quality that will always serve her, no matter what career she chooses or where life takes her. 

“A large part of computer science and coding is ‘debugging,’” explained Aracan, a junior at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson. “You have to have the grit to look at 100 lines of code and find your one error.” 

Persistence has helped Aracan advance in the all-girls institution’s signature STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) program, and the same quality has helped NDP develop the technology branch of that pathway.  

“We’ve been kind of bootstrapping this program for a number of years,” said Neil Hrdlick, NDP’s computer science instructor and general technology champion. “We’ve been turning up the energy every year, and we’re getting the groundswell.” 

That includes rising commitment to the two Advanced Placement courses NDP offers for computer science, a new Computer Science Honor Society which inducted seven young women in an inaugural ceremony this winter, and growing participation and enthusiasm for technology-focused extracurriculars – Robotics and Cyber Club for both the middle and upper levels, as well as the upper level’s Girls Who Code Club, in which students share with each other the skills and techniques they have developed via collaborative projects.  

NDP’s STEAM program, including the technology path, has attracted notice, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized NDP’s commitment to fostering cyber citizenship with a National FBI Safe Online Surfing Award.  

FBI Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Boone and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Jill Murphy, both of the bureau’s Baltimore Field Office, visited the school and presented the award March 16.  

“They’re sending their agent in charge, because she’s a woman, and she’s very excited about coming to an all-girls school,” Mary Agnes Sheridan, STEAM director for NDP, said beforehand.

It’s just the latest technology-related honor bestowed upon NDP, which recently won its second consecutive AP Computer Science Female Diversity Award.  

In September, the U.S. Department of Education gave NDP its highest award, naming the institution a Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Sheridan says that the STEAM program, and the technology path specifically, is critical to NDP’s pursuit of excellence.  

“It permeates every course – everything that we do,” she said, noting that the focus also facilitated a relatively easy transition to online learning upon the onset of the pandemic. “When you get to work with people who are this good, it makes the job so easy.”

NDP was founded in 1873 by the School Sisters of Notre Dame and educates girls in grades 6 through 12. It offers technology courses at the outset, through the middle level’s Innovate and Design Time program. Courses such as Digital Design and Logic and Games in grade 6 and Computer Coding and Digital Communications in Grade 7 prepare girls for the upper level.  

Senior Sofia Rest followed that path and is now blazing her own.  

“The skill that was most valuable to me was being able to look at a problem and plan out what you want to do,” she said. “You stick it out even when it gets hard. Basically, it’s the essentials of problem solving.” 

Rest said her NDP technology courses have taught her about back-end development and programming languages such as Java and Python. To help her in her goal to learn more front-end development, Hrdlick helped sign her up for a course on HTML and CSS.  

“In college, I want to combine computer science with another outside aspect,” Rest said. 

She noted that a co-concentration in English or a similar discipline would open the door to fields such as “natural language processing” and “computational linguistics.” 

Hrdlick came to NDP after a 30-plus-year career at Northrup Grumman, where he worked in applied engineering and computer science.  

“My goal is to bring my previous world experience to teaching,” he explained. “It’s not just ‘Do this’; it’s ‘Do this because …’” he said. “It’s bringing that applied side to what they’re learning.” 

Hrdlick is thrilled to be preparing women for the field.  

“For any engineering design process, the first step is brainstorming, and you don’t want like-minded people,” he said. “I’ve been on the other side – I’ve seen a bunch of men in shirts and ties solving problems. I’ve seen change in the last 10, 12, 20 years, but I don’t think it’s changing fast enough.”

Bringing women into the mix, Hrdlick added, “will enrich your solution and whatever subject you’re working on.” 

Meanwhile, seventh-grader Krysta Blaha savors the challenge. 

“In computer science, there’s always something you didn’t think about,” she said, describing the trouble-shooting process that is essential to both robotics and writing code. “I would think about this one thing, and then there would be three other things.” 

Last year, NDP awarded 48 STEAM certificates, with six of those in computer science.   

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