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 By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated.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

This University Will Pay Its Students $30,000 to Take a Year Off to Travel

How do we get high school kids more excited about college and inspire our next generation of leaders? The answer may be to kick our graduating seniors out of the country for a year.
Okay, so it’s not exactly as harsh as that sounds, but Tufts University is getting attention for encouraging their incoming students to do something that Europeans have been doing for ages — taking a year off to travel before starting college (aka, a gap  year). According to the Associated Press, Tuft’s gap year program will pay for housing, airfare and even visa fees, which can add up to $30,000 or more.
If it sounds like Tufts is sponsoring 18-year-olds to get drunk abroad, it’s important to note that isn’t the case. Rather, the Tufts program — which is called Tufts 1+4 — is actually a structured, full-time, national or international volunteer service with the aim of grooming a new generation of civic leaders. “The idea behind the program is to give incoming students a transformational experience that will inform the next four years of their education,” says Tufts dean Alan D. Solomont. Tufts is joining the list of other elite universities such as Princeton and Harvard that also have gap year programs.
MORE: Why the U.S. Should Adopt the “Finnish Way” of Education
Many high school grads feel burned out after being in school for most of their lives, which is why many take a gap year. In their report, the AP cites the American Gap Year Association which found that 40,000 high school grads took time off before starting college in 2013. But here’s why this year-long break is a good idea: “Students who take a gap year are 90 percent likely to return to university within one year: In essence, gap year graduates are more likely to attend university than their peers,” the organization writes.
The key is to use the year off constructively. Gap years can be beneficial if it allows a student to work in a certain industry they are passionate about. Just imagine the real-world experiences a prospective biology student would glean if he or she volunteered at a nature conversation site — that would certainly open his or her eyes much more to their subject than reading about it from a textbook or from a stuffy classroom lecture. Additionally, after a gap year, these students return to the classroom with a new focus and enthusiasm to hit the books, are more likely to have better GPAs, get more involved with campus life, and are more likely to graduate in four years.
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The American Gap Year Association found that gap year kids have greater global awareness, foreign language skills, self-confidence, and (gasp!) even maturity from living abroad. So whether or not other colleges follow Tuft’s footsteps, we think it sounds like a good way to cut down the number of new college students spending freshman year in an alcoholic stupor.

Imagine a New Generation of Highly Skilled, Multilingual Americans

For America to remain a global leader, we need our students to have a world-class education. That’s why students in Northern Arizona University’s Global Science and Engineering Program and Valparaiso University’s International Engineering Program double major in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field and a foreign language and spend an entire year abroad, Inside Higher Ed reports.
Encouragingly, even though these programs require an extra year of college and semesters abroad, they either cost the same or just slightly more in tuition compared to other fields of study. The universities are doing this with international exchange programs, paid internships and scholarships.
MORE: These Kindergarteners Already Speak More Languages Than You
The fastest-growing jobs in America are in STEM but these institutions — modeled after the University of Rhode Island’s renowned five-year International Engineering program — are preparing their students to succeed outside our own borders, as well. As the Inside Higher Ed article points out, students in the STEM fields of do not typically take advantage of study abroad programs because of their demanding course requirements or perhaps their lack of interest in studying a foreign language. But in our increasingly globalized economy, we need a workforce that’s not just technically skilled, but one that has knowledge about the world — from different languages and cultures, to different environmental and social systems.