Moira Hardek, GitHub's senior director of education, thinks building a diverse tech workforce starts by engaging children early and easing them in to coding with the discipline's foundational concepts.

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As GitHub's senior director of education, Moira Hardek identifies ideas and strategies to make students feel excited about and connected to the world of computer science and coding. 

GitHub recently announced that teachers who join GitHub's Global Campus and use GitHub Classroom now get free access to Codespaces, GitHub's integrated development environment. In addition, GitHub also announced plans to host two in-person graduation events this month.

Moira Hardek

Hardek said about 1.9 million students are active in the GitHub Education platform.

"What is particularly game-changing about Codespaces in the education space is how the development environment is set up," said Hardek. "So for anybody that has ever tried to code as either a student or tried to teach, setting up that development environment can take minutes, it can take hours, it can completely derail someone's experience in computer science and turn them around just to get into the place where then you start writing the syntax."

In a recent conversation with ZDNet, Moira talked about what got her interested in tech, opportunities to introduce tech education experiences to students, the sense of community within GitHub, and misconceptions and opportunities in tech education. 

Below is our interview. It has been condensed and edited.

What opened the door to making a career in technology?

Treating computer science just like it's just one solid block of content and topic, I think, has been one of the biggest mistakes, in general, the education community has made in teaching computer science. Moira Hardek, GitHub

Moira Hardek: I've always been surrounded by strong female role models. Actually, my high school that I went to was the world's largest all-girls Catholic high school. So you can imagine I had a lot of empowerment but was very surprised and disappointed when I walked into the industry and it looked a lot different than the real positive message that I got. 

So early in my career, I realized a lot of times I was the only woman in the room when it came to technical work, and I also actually worked a lot on the services side of technology. As I looked around the room, as I looked around at my experiences that weren't so great, I wanted to change what the room looked like, and I wanted to focus on diversity. So I started to drift this way into education.

Moving from a corporate job to a tech education advocate

MH: When I went to go work for Best Buy, the world's largest consumer electronics retailer at the time, we had some really brilliant leaders. There was a very innovative CEO back then by the name of Brad Anderson. I'm still a big fan of his. 

I thought his approach