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.”
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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 By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated.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.
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“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.”

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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.”
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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.
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These Computer Science Programs Have Just What Women Want

The likes of Marie Curie and Jane Goodall may have set great examples for future female scientists, and it’s time that more women follow in their footsteps — especially when it comes to computer science.
For all the jobs available in the industry and programs to train workers for it, a mere 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women. Can we balance out the gender gap amongst computer scientists? Some of the top institutions of higher learning have already started, according to The New York Times.
At Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, 40 percent of incoming freshmen are women, and almost a third of computer science graduates this year were women at the University of Washington. And that’s not all. Harvey Mudd College in California boasts that 40 percent of their computer science program enrollees are female and this year, more than half of their engineering school graduates were women — a first for the school.
As promising as these numbers are, these three schools represent only a fraction of the computer science programs in the country. The question remains – what’s their secret, and how can it spread to every school?
Unsurprisingly, there is no cure-all, but one general trend is helping out everywhere: With so many professional opportunities for computer science majors, the field in general is attracting more students — regardless of gender.
But what sets Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, and Harvey Mudd apart is that they are grabbing potential students when they’re younger by promoting computer science at an earlier age. By hosting summer camps and training high school teachers to teach computer science, girls are more likely to gain exposure to the discipline and develop a lifelong interest in it.
Another tactic used by these schools is revamping their marketing and support systems. Harvey Mudd, for example, has featured female students in their brochures to show that it’s normal for girls to study science. “We made it very clear that being a female scientist, that’s normal,” said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd. Plus, the school now talks about computer science as a way to problem solve (as opposed to it simply being about technical coding), putting an emphasis on its practical applications.
At Carnegie Mellon, the requirement to have prior experience in order to enter the major was eliminated and an official student mentorship program was established. By removing barriers and easing the process of becoming a computer science major, more women are showing interest.
Good news is, this can be easily replicated elsewhere.
As Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon told The New York Times, “I don’t think we’re doing anything that nobody else could do, but it has to be sustained and institutionalized.”
If other schools picked up some tips from this trend-setting trio, America could be well on its way to unlocking a whole new set of minds for computer science.
MORE: Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?

Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?

With technology being such a booming and prevalent industry, it does seem a bit odd that, in general, it’s failed to reach such an important demographic: Girls.
As females make a large impact in colleges and in the workforce (more than 40 percent of women are their family’s breadwinner), they have been unable to make their break in the computer science industry. Which is why companies like Google and other nonprofits are looking to reverse that trend.
Computer science is one of the fastest growing fields with job projection numbers poised to reach 4.2 million by 2020, yet less than 1 percent of high school girls are interested in it. Additionally, the number of women in the computer science industry dropped from 37 percent in 1980s to 18 percent now. Furthermore, only 7 percent of venture capitalist deals go to female founders and CEOs, and only 20 percent of the 300,000 students in AP computer science classes are girls.
Which is why Google is now stepping in and launching its “Made with Code” campaign targeting girls. The first component is a video featuring girls meeting President Obama. In the background, a voice says: “You are a girl who understands bits exist to be assembled. When you learn to code, you can assemble anything that you see missing. And in so doing, you will fix something, or change something, or invent something, or run something, and maybe that’s how you will play your bit in this world.”
An interactive website is next. Featured on the site are bios of female role models who write software that designs fabrics or choreographs dances. The site also has entertaining coding lessons and a directory of coding programs — all aimed at young women.
Google is also offering $50 million in grants as well as partnering with nonprofits, such as Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that was started two years ago and organizes girls’ summer coding institutes.
Google’s initiative is a great first step, and hopefully with the support of additional groups, the numbers of female coders will grow.
MORE: The Small Act That Makes a Big Impact on Young Girls

Get Schooled on How to Earn a Computer Science Education for Free

What can you do if you want to study computer science in college, but don’t have $50,000 lying around for tuition?
As LifeHacker reports, thanks to app developer aGupieWare, anyone with access to the Internet can take computer science classes from the likes of MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and other elite institutions. The best part? All of this top-notch education is free. (Yes, you read that right. Free!)
aGupieWare says that their bachelors-level curriculum is cobbled together from numerous available online computer science courses and video lectures from top universities across the country — from Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science to Stanford University’s Programing Paradigms. There are even electives from (California-based) International Technical University’s iPhone App Development series and University of California, Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence courses.
Granted, you won’t be sitting in an actual classroom or receiving a degree from the institutions, but you can do this on your own time — and even while wearing your pajamas, if you like. Plus, you’ll also be walking away with a load of knowledge, not to mention, be free of debt.
MORE: The Next Frontier in Online Education Isn’t What You’d Expect
The program not only works for high school grads who can’t afford college but aspire to be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg (both of whom never actually finished college and are doing just fine), but it also makes sense for working adults looking to gain another set of skills for the workplace or even those interested in a career change.
Not interested in computer science? As Lifehacker notes, this program is just one of many subject matters available at our fingertips. Dubbed Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), there are numerous courses that allow anyone — from high school grads to working adults — to seek a better life through higher education simply by logging online.
With the skyrocketing costs of tuition (not to mention our country’s enormous student loan bubble), the idea of a free education and even tuition-free colleges have the potential to change the face of the education industry. And while you can’t receive an actual bachelor’s degree yet, by the looks of things, you might soon be able to.

Chicago Schools Just Made This Tech-Savvy Move. The Rest of the Country Is Next

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are making a serious investment in the future of its students by adding computer science to its high school core curriculum, and offering it starting in kindergarten — the first urban school district to do so. CPS high schools will begin including a foundational computer science class within three years, upgrading the subject from elective to core; within five years, kindergarten through eighth-graders will be able to take computer courses as well. The goal is to increase kids’ computer literacy and get them coding at a young age, so they can compete for high-paying jobs. Anyone who’s been paying attention to education trends lately knows that globally American kids have fallen behind in the S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. “The new bilingual is knowing computer code writing, and what we’re setting up today, while it’s a good foundation, the fact is that in the U.K. and in China, computer science and computer coding is now fundamental to elementary school education, and we’re playing catch-up to that effort,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
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