Mediaboss Marketing

A free, eight-week-long coding workshop for students in grades eight through 11, kicked off June 12, at Northern New Mexico College.

The program will be one of three classes run by the Albuquerque-based Cultivating Coders, this summer. The other two will take place on the Navajo Nation and in the South Valley during the same period of time, June 12 to Aug. 4.

The companys goal is to get high school students excited about computing and software development, according to president and founder Charles Ashley III, who believes computing is just as important as reading and writing.

To date, Cultivating Coders has run 11 workshops throughout New Mexico and will soon bring workshops to Mississippi and Florida, as well. The company partnered with the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation and the Espaola School District to bring the class to 13 students in Espaola.

Ashley compared Espaola to his hometown of Chicago.

The regions are different but the circumstances are the same, he said. I relate to these kids. (In Chicago) you were either drug dealing and gang-banging or you were playing sports. I see a lot of that in Espaola. These kids dont feel there are a lot of options and when, as a teenager, you feel you are without options, you get into trouble.

The program provides free instruction, breakfast and lunch, as well as a free laptop that students get to keep at the end of the eight weeks, thanks to a grant from the Foundation. Ashley said he hopes to make the program as accessible as possible, and would even possibly like to provide transportation to and from the class, in the future.

Technology for rural communities is a real potential game changer, Gwendolyn Warniment, the K-12 director at the Foundation, said. I think Cultivating Coders is an amazing organization that has figured out that beautiful place where change happens.

Other Cultivating Coders workshops have been funded by various private donors and grants, including a grant from Microsoft.

The class begins by teaching students the coding languages HTML, CSS and other basic computer science skills.

The students then learn JavaScript, and finally, spend their last two weeks in the class coming up with project ideas based on something that affects their community. The class votes on the ideas and then groups form to create websites for the projects.

Instructors Kyle Hagler and Dana Yazzie are leading the workshop.

Hagler is a University of Florida computer science graduate and a former instructor at a coding camp in Vancouver, Canada.

Yazzie was a student of the first Cultivating Coders class in Farmington, and has since led six Cultivating Coders workshops and taken a remote developer position at WSI, the worlds largest internet marketing company with more than 80 offices worldwide, according to their website.

We selected her for the Espaola camp because I know her background and her empathy is a great fit for this area, Ashley said of Yazzie.

Having a female teacher is also inspiring for the only two female students in the workshop, Judith Perez, 16; and Rique Fernandez, 17, both of whom discovered the program through a recommendation by their social workers.

Im really interested in (coding), Perez said. At first I wanted to be a veterinarian, but this seems pretty cool.

Perez is excited to use her newfound coding knowledge to create websites where she can share her writing something she is also passionate about.

It feels good (to be in the class), she said. Its like that weird stereotype that girls dont do as much stuff as boys do and were here doing it too, which is really fun.

Fun and empowerment is exactly what Cultivating Coders hopes to provide its students with.

Ashley said he hopes, through the workshops, as well as the ongoing mentorship and after-school coding clubs that Cultivating Coders offers, there will be an explosion of talent in New Mexico in the next few years.

Most of the Espaola workshop students are in high school, but two students, Gabriel Duran, 13, and Eduardo Juarez, 13, are in eighth grade and found the workshop through their involvement in their schools gifted students program.

For these two, and other young students, the goal is not to immediately make them employable, as is the goal with which the adult Cultivating Coders workshops began, but instead, to put them on a path of computing. Duran said he sees himself pursuing a career in computer animation, while Juarez is considering software development.

Ashley noted how gifted the boys are and said he hopes some day they will create the next Facebook.

See the article here:
Program Aims to Cultivate Coders - Rio Grande Sun