Teens, tweens and kids are often referred to as “digital natives.” Having grown up with the Internet, smartphones and tablets, they’re often extraordinarily adept at interacting with digital technology. But Mitch Resnick, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is skeptical of this descriptor. Sure, young people can text and chat and play games, he says, “but that doesn’t really make you fluent.”

Fluency, Resnick proposes in today’s talk, comes not through interacting with new technologies, but through creating them. The former is like reading, while the latter is like writing. He means this figuratively — that creating new technologies, like writing a book, requires creative expression — but also literally: to make new computer programs, you actually must write the code.

The point isn’t to create a generation of programmers, Resnick argues. Rather, it’s that coding is a gateway to broader learning. “When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it’s the same thing with coding: If you learn to code, you can code to learn,” he says. Learning to code means learning how to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. And these skills are applicable to any profession — as well as to expressing yourself in your personal life, too.

In his talk, Resnick describes Scratch, the programming software that he and a research group at MIT Media Lab developed to allow people to easily create and share their own interactive games and animations. Below, find 10 more places you can learn to code, incorporating Resnick’s suggestions and our own.

1. At Codecademy, you can take lessons on writing simple commands in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, Python and Ruby. (See this New York Times piece from last March, on Codecademy and other code-teaching sites, for a sense of the landscape.)
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2. One of many programs geared toward females who want to code, Girl Develop It is an international nonprofit that provides mentorship and instruction. “We are committed to making sure women of all ages, races, education levels, income, and upbringing can build confidence in their skill set to develop web and mobile applications,” their website reads. “By teaching women around the world from diverse backgrounds to learn software development, we can help women improve their careers and confidence in their everyday lives.”
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3. Stanford University’s Udacity is one of many sites that make college courses—including Introduction to Computer Science—available online for free. (See our post on free online courses for more ideas.)
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4. If college courses seem a little slow, consider Code Racer, a “multi-player live coding game.” Newbies can learn to build a website using HTML and CSS, while the more experienced can test their adeptness at coding.
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5. The Computer Clubhouse, which Resnick co-founded, works to “help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies,” as he describes. According to Clubhouse estimates, more than 25,000 kids work with mentors through the program every year.
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6. Through CoderDojo’s volunteer-led sessions, young people can learn to code, go on tours of tech companies and hear guest speakers. (Know how to code? You can set up your own CoderDojo!)
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7. Code School offers online courses in a wide range of programming languages, design and web tools.
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8. Similarly, Treehouse (the parent site of Code Racer) provides online video courses and exercises to help you learn technology skills.
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9. Girls Who Code, geared specifically toward 13- to 17-year-old girls, pairs instruction and mentorship to “educate, inspire and equip” students to pursue their engineering and tech dreams. “Today, just 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by women, and less than 10% of venture capital-backed companies have female founders. Yet females use the internet 17% more than their male counterparts,” the website notes.
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10. Through workshops for young girls of color, Black Girls Code aims to help address the “dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions,” founder Kimberly Bryant writes, and build “a new generation of coders, coders who will become builders of technological innovation and of their own futures.”

“Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” That’s what is claimed in a goofy public service announcement, made by the European Commission, which aims to convince young women that science careers are in fact “cool.” Naturally, for a few days the Twittersphere has been atwitter over the very pink ad, which instead shows that girls can simultaneously do science and appear in an ’80s music video … ?

Today on Boingboing, Maggie Koerth-Baker has posted a great response to the ad, in the form of an interview with Dr. Margo Seltzer, a computer scientist at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In the interview, Seltzer says that she does think the public image of “scientists” as male affects young girls’ desire to join the ranks.

“As a society we’ve done a really, really bad job of marketing what it means to be in software,” Seltzer says. “If you ask somebody, ‘What does a computer programmer look like?’ I think almost everyone in the world will give you the same description — it’s a nerdy guy with no social skills.”

Not. True. If you’re looking for images of female software designers, or female scientists more generally, browse these TEDTalks from 70+ physicists, biologists, science writers, psychologists, engineers, doctors, technologists, oceanographers, roboticists, even an astronaut. Just click around the text block below …

Diane Kelly … Melissa Garren … Tali Sharot … Christina Warinner … Regina Dugan … Noel Bairey Merz … Lucianne Walkowicz … Lucianne Walkowicz again … Quyen Nguyen … Sheila Nirenberg … The three teenagers who won the Google Science Fair last year … Michelle Borkin … Cheryl Hayashi … Cynthia Kenyon … Jen Pahlka … Erica Frenkel … Lisa Harouni … Anna Mracek Dietrich … Angela Belcher … Susan Lim … Cynthia Breazeal … Nalini Nadkarni again … Jane McGonigal … Cat Lainé … Janine Benyus again … Catherine Mohr … Carolyn Porco again … Pattie Maes … Susan Savage-Rumbaugh … Elizabeth Murchison … Dyan deNapoli … Jessica Green … Nina Tandon … Edith Widder … Edith Widder again … Annmarie Thomas … Isabel Behncke … Janna Levin … Patricia Kuhl … Hawa Abdi and Deqo Mohamed … Ariel Garten … Heather Knight … Deborah Rhodes … Barbara Block … Jessa Gamble … Laurie Santos … Aditi Shankardass … Dee Boersma … Juliana Machado Ferreira … Temple Grandin … Andrea Ghez … Rachel Pike … Rachel Armstrong … Rebecca Saxe … Nina Jablonski … Mary Roach … Carolyn Porco … Mae Jemison … Margaret Wertheim … Bonnie Bassler … Nalini Nadkani … Jill Tarter … Sylvia Earle … Penelope Boston … Jane Goodall … Jane Goodall again … Patricia Burchat … Louise Leakey … Helen Fisher … Helen Fisher again … Jill Bolte Taylor … Deborah Gordon … Tierney Thys … Janine Benyus … Eva Vertes … Sheila Patek