OAKLAND, Calif. — The lab starts filling up after school lets out. Students trickle in. They help themselves to a snack — today it’s tacos — and chat excitedly with friends. They laugh and joke, listening to Beyoncé and Rihanna on built-in speakers. Soon, employees from one of the world’s most influential companies will arrive to teach these students about computer science: how to program computer games, how to work with data and how to found and run a business.
Code Next is a free after-school program designed to make tech more accessible to students of color, many of whom lack opportunities to explore STEM fields in middle and high school. That affects the pathways students pick in college: A smaller share of Black and Latino students earn degrees in a STEM field than in other degree programs, according to a recent Pew Research study.
And that in turn affects people’s career choices. Code Next was launched by Google in 2016 in response to the stubbornly low numbers of people of color working in tech — only 3 percent of Google’s tech employees were Black or Latino back in 2014.
Code Next helps students picture themselves working in a STEM field by providing hands-on training and exposure to the tools and strategies used by scientists and engineers. Teenagers come to the lab to develop their own projects under the tutelage of Google employees and Code Next’s academic coaches. Projects include making animations, creating statistical databases of favorite sports teams and designing programs that can identify pneumonia in scans of human lungs. Some students have started businesses, while others have designed apps or built robots. Students work with hardware like microboards and single-board computers, as well as software, learning coding languages like Java, Python, HTML and CSS, and C++.
In addition to this lab space, Code Next runs campuses in New York and Michigan, and also offers some of its programs remotely. In the last seven years, the program has helped thousands of students feel more at home exploring science, technology, engineering and math. More than 90 percent of Code Next’s latest cohort of high school graduates advanced to higher education, the vast majority in STEM fields, according to a Code Next survey.
It’s significant progress toward the goal of connecting more young people with educational and career opportunities in technology. Still, in a city where math test scores are lower than average, some parents say even well-resourced programs backed by titans of the tech industry will only make a limited difference without broader interventions.
Source link
Leave a Reply