Alongside the glinting waves and pristine beachfront property, a surge of talent is transforming Miami into a tech hub.
The Kauffman Index rated the metropolitan area of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach as the number one entrepreneurial area in America, and international tech startups are using the city for its geographic proximity to Latin America.
But in Broward County, just north of the white sands of Miami Beach, there’s a stark reality for the youth of color: They don’t have access to technology or entrepreneurial leaders the same way that some of their well-to-do peers do.
“In areas of high growth in the tech and entrepreneurial or small business sector, [minority] populations are completely left out of that activity,” says Felecia Hatcher-Pearson, co-founder of Code Fever Miami. “If you have an idea, oftentimes you have to leave your neighborhood in order to execute on that idea or get the right resources in order to make that happen. And that’s a problem.”
Hatcher-Pearson’s organization is bridging that digital divide — which she refers to as an “innovation desert” — by providing opportunities to young teens of color in coding lessons and pitching business startup ideas.
Since 2013, Code Fever has introduced more than 3,000 youth and adults to the tech ecosystem. It’s also served as host to more than 100 tech events, including boot camps and hack-a-thons.
This isn’t Hatcher-Pearson’s first attempt at bringing entrepreneurship to youth. After losing her marketing job at Nintendo in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, she moved back into her parent’s Florida home and opened an ice cream and popsicle stand in Broward County. She noticed that the kids in the community looked up to moneymakers: those selling drugs.
“Sometimes the first way [these kids] get introduced to entrepreneurship in their neighborhoods when they live in impoverished neighborhoods, it’s the guy that’s selling on the block, right? And if he’s successful, he’s getting a mentor, like someone showing him how to do it,” she says.
Hatcher-Pearson began pairing teens with entrepreneurs to learn how to market and sell sweets using extra stands she had laying around.
“We know what happens when young people can’t get their first jobs or don’t learn the basic skills on how to be self-sustainable, the entire cycle of poverty continues,” she says.
As Miami’s tech scene started taking off in 2010, Hatcher-Pearson recognized a similar lack of entrepreneurial mentorship.
“It wasn’t inclusive,” says Hatcher-Pearson, referring to the tech scene in Miami. “It didn’t include the black community or the Caribbean community in any of the activity, the resources, the programming or any of the spaces.”
With the help of her husband, Derek, the two started Code Fever.
The organization’s reputation is built on its ability to foster African American tech talent through its Black Tech Week. The summit provides multiple pitch opportunities to help finance burgeoning startups, class intensives geared toward making older generations more digitally native and education for teachers on how to bring in more technology into the classroom — a massive hindrance for students, Hatcher says.
“Oftentimes, their teachers don’t have the right tech training or tech confidence, and they’re the ones that are not doing a good job of allowing technology to be in the classroom,” Hatcher-Pearson says.
Ryan Hall, who heads the curriculum for Code Fever and Black Tech Week, says that based on his own personal experience, the role the organization plays in students’ lives is essential.
“I personally found that I was in a lot of these tech spaces, and I didn’t see a lot of people who look like me,” Hall says. “We care about taking people who are minorities and bringing them into the technology economy, because it has the ability to raise people out of their socioeconomic situation.”
Both Hatcher-Pearson and Hall attribute the program’s success to its ability to allow kids of color to integrate their own personal lifestyles and interests into coding. Code Fever accomplishes this by bringing in local black celebrities and creating hybrid projects that merge music and tech or sports and tech.
“Culture plays a major role in introducing students to [science, technology, engineering or math] fields,” says Hatcher-Pearson. “We have to introduce them to computer programming because… the current narrative is that the black and brown community doesn’t exist in tech, and we are pioneers in tech and innovation.”
The 2017 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
Correction: A previous version of this video stated that Miami is the birthplace of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He was born in Albuquerque, N.M. NationSwell apologizes for this error.
[button url=”http://nationswell4.wpengine.com/tech-impact-allstars-2017/#vote-now-for-your-favorite-tech-impact-allstar” ]Vote for Felecia Now![/button]
Tag: coding
Learning to Code Is Vital for Today’s Students. This Nonprofit Helps Schools Teach It
Acerlia Bennet, a 17-year-old New Yorker from the Bronx, likes to read heady political news, often twice, from top to bottom, to make sure she’s fully comprehending the story. But she knows she’s unique: Her peers spend more time sharing memes. So at a local hackathon sponsored by Code/Interactive last summer, Bennet and three other high schoolers built a preliminary website that could translate hard news into more entertaining teen-speak. The algorithm, written with the programming language Python over a 72-hour weekend, extracts text from newspapers and replaces big, confusing words with simpler terms. “That way, they read it and know what’s going on,” Bennet says.
That type of out-of-the-box thinking — and the deep understanding of code to make it a reality — is the end goal of Code/Interactive (C/I), a nonprofit based in New York City. Since 2010, C/I has helped public schools better teach computer science. The program, which currently counts about 5,000 students in six states, is comprehensive: As early as third grade, kids begin experimenting with simple, block-based coding. By the time they reach high school, C/I is preparing them to excel on the Advance Placement (AP) computer science exam.
Besides equipping students with invaluable coding and web development skills, C/I provides teacher training and curricula for the classroom; hosts hackathons and arranges office tours at tech companies for students; and provides a select number of full-ride college scholarships, attracting those teens who otherwise wouldn’t apply for, or couldn’t afford to earn, a computer science degree.
“These computer skills are as fundamental to this generation of students as carpentry was to my father. Back then, not everyone built a home, but they all knew how to hang a picture and how to assemble a table,” says Mike Denton, C/I’s executive director. “The knowledge about tech you interact with is invaluable, and it’s necessary as these technologies become ubiquitous in every industry.”
[ph]
C/I got its start in 2001 as an arts organization in the Bronx. Back then, the nonprofit was providing basic technology like video cameras, color printers and online-accessible computers to at-risk youth. By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated. Denton, then a board member, left his consulting work to revamp the agency. Under his leadership, C/I began offering an after-school coding class on JavaScript at a local community center. “We recognized pretty quickly that teaching 20 kids would not solve the problems we knew existed,” Denton says. To scale their vision, C/I turned its focus to integrating programming lessons into the school day.
C/I first works with teachers who don’t have a background in computer science or engineering, offering seminars during professional development days. Over the course of anywhere from six days to six weeks throughout the year, educators come together to talk through the coding coursework, asking questions ranging from the simple, like what HTML stands for (that would be HyperText Markup Language), to wondering if there is a way to learn coding without a computer on hand (there is).
They also learn that C/I’s pedagogical method derives from an unexpected source: foreign language classes. After all, says Denton, “Computer science, more than anything else, is a language.” So like in Spanish or German classes, the teachers coach students in “grammar,” showing how individual units must be strung together, line by line. The new coders then, in turn, put those lessons into practice as they work to build a website or design a mobile app. Later on in their instruction, students participate in the equivalent of an all-immersive study-abroad trip, diving in to collaborative projects at weekend hackathons.
As students master the new language, like Bennet has done, C/I organizes office tours to show the multiplicity of careers in tech. In Austin, Texas, for example, students might visit a cloud-storage company’s offices or an architectural firm, all of which can use the language of coding in different ways. In New York, Bennet has dropped in at Google, BuzzFeed, FourSquare and so many small startups that she can’t remember all of the names.
[ph]
“A lot of times students say they want to be a lawyer or doctor because they know those are professions where you can make money more easily. But they might not be aware of the other positions that are available to them,” says Julia Barraford-Temel, C/I’s program manager for its Texas program, Coding4TX. “We bring them there so they can visualize their future.”
To be sure, C/I is not a workforce-development program. Students aren’t funneled into entry-level software testing jobs as soon as they complete their coursework. (About 70 percent of graduating seniors from C/I do choose computer science as a major or minor in college.) As a student at an arts high school focused on film, Bennet, for example, likes the idea of pursuing animation at a company like Pixar. But whichever career path she chooses, she credits C/I with strengthening her creative approach to problem-solving. “Computer science is not just a bunch of code,” she says. “It’s more about connecting through software and tech, with everyone building and creating and being more innovative.”
Denton echoes her point. To him, the main goal of C/I is for young people to understand the technology that now dictates so much of our lives. “We’re only at the beginning of the tech revolution,” he says. “By 2025, these kids are genuinely going to make a massive difference in the world.”
______
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Here Are Your 2016 Inherent Prize Finalists
One of these movers and shakers will be awarded with the Inherent Prize in recognition of their social entrepreneurship. The grand-prize winner receives $50,000, with the runner-up nabbing $25,000. Get to know more about each below, and check back after November 15th to read about the winner.
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
Could New Orleans Become the Silicon Valley of the South?
At first glance, Louisiana’s river delta might seem like an unusual place to hold a coding boot camp. For starters, it’s 2,250 miles from Apple’s and Facebook’s campuses in Silicon Valley. But when John Fraboni, a video game designer and jazz musician from Canada, relocated to the area a few years ago, he began noticing untapped tech talent all around him. Knowing that the booming tech industry offers its engineers both high salaries and meaningful work, Fraboni mapped out an intensive training program for at-risk youth called Operation Spark. The goal: Within four and a half months, his students would know how to program a website’s front and back ends, becoming “full-stack” developers, as it’s known in the industry.
Fraboni’s plan worked: Every single graduate from the immersion program now has a full-time job.
Operation Spark offers programming lessons in three sessions. The first, a two-week aptitude test, exposes kids to coding. Since only one-tenth of American high schools offer computer science, tinkering with a computer’s insides is a first-time experience for many. It’s during this two-week trial where, very quickly, “you figure out whether you love it or not,” says Fraboni. For those who do, a monthlong boot camp covers programming fundamentals, as participants build web applications. In the final phase, students immerse themselves in a comprehensive, three-month training on everything from algorithmic thinking to APIs and mobile, for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week.
Initially, Fraboni and just one other employee trained about 40 youth, a little more than half of whom would continue through all three phases. The company, though, is growing, having hired eight more instructors. Their COO, Max Gaudin, who started as a volunteer, is now in charge of expanding the program’s reach. The aim, says Fraboni, is to eventually take the model statewide.
Operation Spark fills a dire need in the New Orleans area, where approximately one in every five young adults is neither working nor pursuing a degree, a category of 16- to 24-year-olds known as “opportunity youth.” The city has the dubious distinction of ranking third in the country for disconnected young people, behind Memphis, Tenn., and Las Vegas. Currently, those 26,000 teens and mid-twentysomethings largely rely on public support and entitlement programs, a 2015 report by Tulane University found.
“There are a lot of people struggling here,” says Fraboni. “The prospects for them are maybe not the same that you and I had. Just think about what it’s like for someone from a low-income situation to figure out what to do in life. Most of us didn’t know what we wanted to be as undergrads, and our parents or our community were able to help us figure it out. A lot of young people in New Orleans don’t have that privilege.”
[ph]
Fraboni was inspired to reach out to the city’s young people after moving back to the area three years ago. It was his second time living in the Bayou State. For five years in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he’d played drums in jazz clubs. In 2013, after quitting his job in Montreal designing video games, Fabroni returned to the South. He was grateful to New Orleans for welcoming him during his early concert gigs — “I was accepted despite my nationality, despite my race, and I was able to cross a lot of lines,” he says — and he wanted to give back to the city. After his most recent move, he connected with Tulane’s Center for Public Service and toured the city’s schools and community centers. Seeing kids using mobile apps, Fraboni wondered if he could tap into their curiosity about how the programs were made.
Video games became an entry point to get young adults’ attention. “That was the hook right there. If you have an Android phone, you can write an app with me right now and in two hours, you can show it off to your friends,” says Fraboni, who started teaching rudimentary classes at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church while applying for grants that could fund a more robust curriculum. He wanted kids to “really apply themselves in the way they need to jump from zero knowledge to a job,” Fraboni explains. Eventually, he paired up with Hack Reactor, a coding boot camp, to make that immersive experience happen.
During the last week of Operation Spark’s program, students refine their resumes and write cover letters to send to employers. Many of the newly minted software engineers now have jobs at big tech firms like Mumms Software and Susco, and their starting salaries range from $50,000 up to $120,000, Fraboni reports. Additionally, multinational corporations with offices in New Orleans have been snapping up Operation Spark grads; GE, for example, recently hired six at $70,000 a year. “We’ve had graduates who say, ‘I went from working in a coffee shop to billing $65 an hour.’ That’s not bad for four months of intensive training.”
[ph]
But before they get those high-paying positions, Operation Spark encourages its participants to use their new coding skills for social good by developing apps and programs that drive change — some of which have been launched as real initiatives post-graduation. To that end, one group built a mobile app called Backscratch, where neighbors can barter points: a free ride to the airport for help painting, for instance. Another student developed an online platform to help finance microloans, such as for the last bit of funds needed to buy a used car. Operation Spark’s most high-profile project was a collaboration with the White House’s Police Data Initiative and the New Orleans Police Department, a weeklong code academy that even the police chief took part in. Parsing the cops’ crime stats, the students were able to create a few apps, including one that could average the response time to a 911 call based on location, and another that analyzed crime trends during large events, like the Mardi Gras parade.
While it’s been tough for Operation Spark’s grads to find programming jobs in New Orleans that compare to the Bay Area’s prestigious tech positions, more students are finding a way to stay in their hometown. Now that Fraboni’s ready to expand statewide, there will be a surging pool of employees ready to change Louisiana’s startup scene. It’s probably time to begin planning for a Silicon Bayou to emerge.
______
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
The City With the Most Ambitious Computer Science Program in the Country
Watch out, Silicon Valley. Our generation’s next tech hub might be in a much windier city.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has partnered with Code.org (a computer science education nonprofit) to help bring computer science classes to every public school in the city, from kindergarten to high school.
CNN Money reports that the most ambitious part of the mayor’s plan (which was announced last December) will require high school students to take computer science courses in order to graduate. Fifty percent of high schools will also be offering AP computer science courses within five years.
“In three years time, you can’t graduate from high school in the city of Chicago if you didn’t take code writing and computer science,” Mayor Emanuel said at a tech conference. “We’re making it mandatory.”
MORE: The App Teaching Children to Code Before They Can Even Tie Their Shoes
Computer science is one of the fastest growing fields with job projection numbers poised to reach 4.2 million by 2020. It’s also one of the most lucrative, with starting salaries between $60,000-70,000. However, this booming and high-paying field is one that’s alarmingly lacking in racial diversity. At Google, for example, only 1 percent of the tech staff is black and 2 percent are Hispanic.
The mayor’s new initiative could help close this gap. As CNN Money notes, the majority of Chicago’s 400,000 public school students are black (39.7 percent) and Hispanic (45.2 percent). By providing Chicago’s young men and women with these skills, it could help level the playing field.
Chicago’s computer education efforts reflects a larger national trend. Coding courses are popping up in elementary and middle schools across the country, and now even kindergarteners are learning how to program. Chicago will also incorporate computer science lessons into the curriculum of 25 elementary schools this year.
“Just having kids jump into computer science at the high school level, they don’t have a good context for it,” Cameron Wilson of Code.org tells CNN Money. “Having them exposed early and building on concepts year after year is really important.”
Code.org has partnered with 30 more school districts to promote K-12 computer education, but Chicago’s is the most far-reaching. As Mayor Emanuel says in the video below, “This plan will also compete with countries where children take coding classes as early as first grade and create an environment where we can support the next Bill Gates and Marissa Mayer.”
[ph]
DON’T MISS: Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?
The App Teaching Children to Code Before They Can Even Tie Their Shoes
Clearly, different eras call for different skills: Kids are now learning about HTML before their ABCs.
More and more computer programming classes are popping up in elementary and middle schools across the country, and now even kindergarteners are learning how to code.
Researchers have developed ScratchJr, a free, open source iPad app that teaches coding basics for kids as young as five.
MORE: Today’s Classrooms Are Now Teaching Tomorrow’s Techies
“When many people think of computer programming, they think of something very sophisticated,” co-developer Mitchel Resnick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells the Associated Press. “But we don’t think it has to be that way.”
ScratchJr (which is a simplified version of the popular programming platform Scratch) allows kids to string coding blocks together in order to make animated characters move, jump, as well as change their size or color, the AP says. The app also lets users add voices and sounds and photos, which means kids can create their own digital storyboards.
While teaching coding to children who might not even know how to read yet sounds a little strange, the idea is to expose kids to computer programming early on so they don’t become intimidated by it as they grow up.
“We don’t want necessarily every young child to become a computer scientist or to work as an engineer, but we want every young child to be exposed to these new ways of thinking that coding makes possible,” says fellow ScratchJr developer Marina Umaschi Bers of Tufts University.
ALSO: Reading, Writing…and Coding? This Teen Works to Improve Digital Education in High Schools
With the boom of tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple, as well as the proliferation of cell phones, tablets and laptops, encouraging younger generations to code not only helps them better understand the world they live in, but allows them to tinker with it and maybe even improve upon it, too.
ScratchJr received $1.3 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. The app is currently available for the iPad, but an Android and Web-compatible version is being developed.
[ph]
Governmental Technology Difficulties Abound, Yet the Future Looks Bright
With a $12 billion budget for 200 major IT programs and a total of $82 billion to spend on IT projects this year, it’s really hard to understand why the government just can’t get it right with digital initiatives. After all, innovations like Facebook have taken off, whereas Healthcare.gov, well, not so much.
According to Fast Company, “the government doesn’t take the same approach to software development that startups do,” explains Matthew McCall, a health technologist who started a well-known petition urging the government to open-source Healthcare.gov when it became obvious that its problems were copious. The government has tens of billions of dollars to ensure success, yet can’t achieve it — while startups with no money often manage to create popular products.
Why does the government have such a problem with technology? Startups are focused on creating a popular product as quickly as possible and once users provide feedback, it can be changed to better suit their needs. The government does the complete opposite of this.
McCall states, “government development focuses more on gathering comprehensive requirements up front, issuing a contract for the work, and managing the contractor during the build out. This ‘big bang’ approach typically means longer development time with little to no customer validation.” Changes are only made if a requirement is no longer valid, which causes developers to no longer focus on the products usefulness.
There are a number of policies in place that make the government different from a startup, like The Paperwork Reduction Act, which prevents developers from asking the public questions about products quickly. In general, many of the governmental policies in place slow down the process of production.
Of course, the government is also more risk-averse, simply by nature because if they get hacked, it is more of a big deal than if a startup was to be hacked.
Fortunately, there’s seems to be a solution this problem. (And no surprise, it’s a start-up.)
OpenGov, a company founded by Zac Bookman and Mike Rosengarten, is helping state and local governments shed their 30-year-old spreadsheets and visualize all data simply with just a few clicks.
MORE: Can a Children’s Book Persuade Girls That Coding Is Cool?
Need more money to control fires? Cities using OpenGov can immediately see how much money has been spent on fire and safety and where they can reallocate money from to help reduce wildfires.
Bookman explains, “there is an epidemic in governments of all shapes and sizes across the country. If you are the mayor of a city and I ask you a basic question about your data like, How much have you spent on police hours over the last five years?’ you probably don’t know of the answer.” With OpenGov, this answer can be found easily.
Major cities like Los Angeles and Palo Alto are already using this to help with city government, as are residents, as OpenGov isn’t just for city officials. Cole explains, “it’s to our benefit as public servants to demystify budget data to rebuild trust through transparency and accountability.”
So, why didn’t the government create this solution earlier?
Often, the problem stems from the lack available talent. The best engineers want to work for companies like Google or Facebook, not the government. Those big companies have better recruitment tactics than the government does, and according to Rosengarten, “if more students understood the problems or that the potential opportunity to solve real hard challenges with the local governments, they would get more excited.”
Although governmental work will never be as sexy as, say, working for Twitter or Square, the government does offer coders with the opportunity to code for a better world.
McCall notes, “if government can attract and retain people who want to make a difference and are given that opportunity, I think it will go a long way.”
Think You Can Build an App That Saves the World From Asteroids?
If you’ve ever dreamed of saving the world from an impending asteroid collision, and you’ve got a better solution than hiring Bruce Willis to bomb the asteroid to smithereens, we’ve got the competition for you.
On April 12 and 13, during NASA’s third annual Space Apps Challenge, hundreds of scientists and software engineers joined together in a 48-hour hackathon to come up with solutions to vexing global and interstellar problems. NASA comes up with the puzzlers for the event, and anybody with the engineering chops to work on them is invited to try. Teams on six continents and at over a hundred locations work on the problems.
In total, there were 40 challenges, such as this one in the category of asteroids: “Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids.” Other tasks included trying to make a “Track that Wetland” app — allowing citizen scientists to record observations and data on the wetlands in their communities — and creating a design for a greenhouse that NASA could use to keep visitors on the moon or Mars stocked with fresh produce.
Each year, the challenges result in the creation of useful apps. Last year, software engineer James Wanga’s team won the Best Hardware Prize for building the prototype of an asteroid mapper. Wanga told Denise Chow of Space.com, “There’s a spirit that infects everyone when we realize all these people around the world are working on the same thing.”
After participating in the NASA Challenge, Wanga and three colleagues started the company Go Lab, which builds tiny satellites for all sorts of uses. Wanga and Co. were at it again this year, coding all weekend long at the Manhattan NASA Space Apps Challenge location in an effort to build a network that could one day allow far-flung astronauts to communicate in space.
“We all understand here that we’re trying to change the world,” Wanga told Chow. “This is the beginning of the space tech boom, and the people here right now are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of space tech start-ups.”
MORE: San Francisco’s Tech Talent Lends A Hand to Help the Homeless
San Francisco’s Tech Talent Lends a Hand to Help the Homeless
Because they want to concentrate their funds and efforts on helping people, nonprofits often have little money or expertise to devote to developing sleek websites, mobile apps, or other tools that draw on the latest technology.
That’s why ReAllocate, a nonprofit that organizes San Francisco’s tech talent to volunteer for the city’s needy, set up its “Hacktivation for the Homeless” from March 28 through 30. Almost 100 software engineers turned up to work on the tech problems of 12 nonprofits serving the homeless of San Francisco.
Among the requests? Larkin Street Youth Services wanted a mobile app that would keep the homeless teens it serves up-to-date on services and allow them reserve beds in its shelter. The Homeless Prenatal Program wanted to enable patients to register online, rather than by filling out paperwork at the office. And the Homeless Employment Collaborative (HEC) wanted to be able to track the people it serves and measure the effectiveness of its programs.
HEC executive director Karen Gruneisen told Josh Wolf of Shareable, “After folks have graduated from our program and gotten a job, they are no longer part of our program and they don’t have a lot of incentive to stick around and stay in touch with us. A smartphone with continued data service in exchange for completing a quarterly survey with status on employment and housing can be just the incentive that we need.”
The nonprofits pitched their needs to the software engineers, then the coders got to work. This hackathon, however, had a unique twist: Instead of working nonstop (which is typical of hackathons), these tech workers were encouraged to take a break from coding and go out on the streets and talk to homeless people, filming their interviews if possible.
Illana Lipsett of ReAllocate told Nellie Bowles of Recode.net, “It’s about fostering a level of empathy between the tech workers, the nonprofits, the homeless. Often, it’s just about creating opportunities for people to interact.”
Organizers hope events like this Hacktivation will ease the growing tensions between tech workers in booming San Francisco and the poor people that the growth has left behind.
MORE: Meet the Undocumented Immigrants Who Created An App to Press for Immigration Reform
Can a Children’s Book Persuade Girls That Coding Is Cool?
Ruby, a “small girl with a huge imagination,” is the redheaded star of Hello Ruby, an illustrated storybook dreamed up by Linda Liukas (also a redhead) as a way to make computer programming fun for young girls. Liukas, a Codeacademy alum and cofounder of Rails Girls, a nonprofit that hosts coding workshops for women around the world, created Hello Ruby and the accompanying activity books to spark the imaginations of young readers and introduce them to what she calls the “magical world of technology.” Earlier this month, Liukas started a Kickstarter campaign to help bring Ruby to life. Her goal was fairly modest: raise $10,000 in order to pay for and distribute 1,000 copies of Hello Ruby in the U.S. and Finland, where Liukas was born and now resides. Ruby herself couldn’t have imagined what happened next. Within a few hours, the fundraising goal was surpassed. As of this writing, almost 5,600 backers have now pledged more than $236,000 to get Hello Ruby in the hands of youngsters everywhere.
MORE: The High-Tech Ride That’s Getting Kids Excited About Coding
Liukas wrote and illustrated Hello Ruby herself, casting technology as a world of beauty and possibility. But she didn’t always see it that way. Liukas first became interested in programming at age 13, when she built a fan site dedicated to her teenage crush: Al Gore. (Yes, you read that right.) “[When I first started taking classes], I thought programming was stupid and I didn’t want to work in technology,” Liukas told Fast Company. “It was hard not having a computer science or computing background. Why would a young girl care about computers?”
It’s no secret that there is a glaring gender imbalance in the computer sciences. According to the Department of Education, only 18 percent of graduates from computer science programs were female in 2011. However, women account for 78 percent of active users on social networking sites, which were almost solely created by men. To help rebalance this equation, Liukas created Ruby, who, through her spunky adventures, teaches girls about programming principles, sequences, open source culture, and storytelling. “Hopefully, this project will lead to a new kind of Internet,” Liukas says. “A gentler Internet.”
ALSO: Chicago Schools Just Made This Tech-Savvy Move. The Rest of the Country Is Next