BEAUMONT — As recent as 2016, the National Girls Collaborative Project reported that women made up half of the total college-educated workforce, but only 29 percent of the science and engineering work force, despite the median annual income for computer programmers being $82,860, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Lamar University, partnering with ExxonMobil, is hoping to change that outlook and to encourage more women to enter the field by reaching them when they are still in middle school.

Using a grant awarded by the Texas Workforce Commission, Lamar hosted three summer camps geared toward 6th, 7th and 8th grade girls, with the latter in attendance on Thursday.

“Nationally, there is a female crisis going on in programming and coding,” Executive Director of the camps Otilia Urbina said. “We have a degree program in the arts and sciences here — computer science department. They only have about four females. That’s not good.”

Urbina said that the program targets the middle school girls because they are more impressionable.

“Those little ones, at that age, don’t even talk about programming and coding,” she said. “We recruited 50 little ladies. We are exposing them to all different types of programs. They are making their own computers, which is unique for females. Then, they are going into gaming.”

The camp teamed up with PAISD to get several students from Port Arthur, Urbina said.

“We’re meeting a national crisis,” she said. “We need more females and more minorities in these positions. We talk to them about careers in programming and coding. We talk about females getting into the field. It has a good salary. It’s not just a male career. They need to think about that. They need to see themselves in that role.”

Briona Graham, a 13-year-old Port Arthur native who attended the camp said she could see her self in that role.

“I would like to be a game developer,” Graham said. “I could also see myself working at a place like Microsoft or one of those companies. I want to pursue a career like those. I want to go to college for computers and game developing and be on the dance team.”

“The camp has been a great experience for me,” she said. “My favorite part was my second class. It’s called Scratch. We animate sprites (two-dimensional images), and yesterday we had to program it to talk to us so that we can chat back and forth with our sprites.”

Graham said each girl would pick a sprite to use and open up a script to type the coding to get the image to react the way the girls wanted.

“For example, if you wanted the sprite to move, you would go to motion,” Graham said. “You would pick the box that says ‘Move 10 steps.’ It doesn’t have to be 10 steps. You can change it from time to time.”

Before and after the camp, the students are given an assessment to determine the progress of the attendees. According to data from the program, the students went from mostly grades around a 1.5, which is the equivalent to a “C” average, to a 4-to-4.5, which is equivalent to an “A.”

The program will follow up with the girls throughout the school year by having Saturday seminars three times a semester.

Urbina said that she would like for the schools to have a place for the students to further their curiosity on their own campuses.

“Ideally, The schools will develop programming and coding clubs on campus where they can come in really get into it on their campus sites,” she said.

This was the first year for the summer camps to be geared towards girls specifically. Urbina said that since the program started in 2011, 41 percent of the campers have gone to Lamar and 91 percent of those students majored in STEM courses.

“That’s what it’s all about,” she said. “That’s how we know it’s working.”

The campers will go to the NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston where they will be introduced to female astronauts on Saturday.