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Our Summer of Code Begins!

6/17/2012

1282 Comments

 
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BlackGirlsCODE kicked off our Summer of Code on Saturday June 17th during the 62nd Annual Juneteenth Festival in San Francisco.  We hosted the one day game development class in coordination with the Urban Game Suite which also included workshops during the weekend with famed animator Leo Sullivan the Emmy Award winning animator of Fat Albert, The Hulk, Batman, and the Fantastic Four.  

During this workshop BGC introduced boys and girls as young as 7  to game development utilizing the Microsoft product KODU. We taught the workshop interactively using the PC interface and incorporated pairs programming, and near peer mentors into the mix. In fact in addition to a wonderful group of talented female software engineers from our BGC volunteer team, we had TAs/and mentors from ages 9 to 17 who jumped right in to teach other students the basics of  creating a video game for the xBox.

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Kodu is a game development tool which works on both a PC and Xbox via a simple visual programming language. The kids quickly picked up the basics and began coding in no time.  They were able to create their own interactive video games and share them with the class during the final presentations.

This was one of the first classes BGC has taught with a mixed gender focus and it went smashingly well.  In fact we even got the parents (and grandparents to stick around for class and join in the experience of seeing their kids get excited about programming and engineering.  The best quote of the day by far was the comment by one of our students at the end of the day.  He asked "so is this what an software engineer does? Then I'm interested in being an engineer".  

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What a rewarding way to end the day and an exciting beginning to our 90 day campaign to introduce more than 200 kids of color to computer programming and technology in 7 cities.  Our journey has just begun and we looking forward to every step!

Happy Father's Day and Happy Juneteenth to all of our friends and supporters!

~BlackGirlsCODE
Follow our campaign on  Indiegogo:       
http://igg.me/p/108824?a=620519 

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1282 Comments

In the Beginning- BlackGirlsCODE Summer of Code

6/14/2012

1757 Comments

 
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In the beginning...April 2011 seems just like yesterday when myself and an amazing group of THREE (yes you read that correctly) friends pooled together our time and personal resources to plant the seeds for BlackGirlsCODE.  Our beginnings as a non-profit organization focusing on introducing girls of color to careers in technology through classes in computer programming were both humble and sincere.  Our team included myself; an electrical engineer by trade, a business colleague and friend from the biotech field, another friend and business associate with a science background who was once a middle school teacher, and a lone Code for America Fellow our only "true" coder who we relied on immensely! But although we may have been lacking in numbers and been slight newbies in the coding skills, we made up for these deficiencies with our passion and dedication.  We all shared a passion to expose girls of color to the many opportunities which abound in STEM fields especially technology. To be honest we found it unbelievable that when we launched BlackGirlsCODE there were no other organizations anywhere focused solely on training girls of color about computer programming and technology. We were the first and we wanted to expose girls from underrepresented communities to the opportunities which existed just a few miles away from our Bayview-Hunter's Point classroom in Silicon Valley.  We were determined to make it happen so we got to work and bootstrapped our first pilot class in October.  When I look back on those early days I truly believe we were moved by passion and driven by vision.  We planned for only 6 girls in our pilot class and saw our numbers grow three times that during our first few classes.  The girls kept coming and amazed us with their ability to grasp the complex topics.  They literally took to programming as they say "like fish to water".  They inspired us to keep going.

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We have been truly blessed to see our program, started from such humble beginnings, continue to grow and expand.  We launched a pilot class in Chicago in May and saw our June "Build a Webpage in a Day Class" in San Francisco sell out in just 2 weeks with more than 50 girls and a huge waiting list.  We were honored to be selected as a Google RISE recipient in 2012 and were very lucky that progressive companies and organizations such as ThoughtWorks and others, saw the potential in our work and have offered their resources and facilities to help us grow. We are truly grateful for this support as well as the many volunteers who volunteer their time as mentors in our classes in multiple cities.  But there is still so much work to do.  We are still primarily operated as a grassroots organization and although we continue to see exponential growth and demand for our programs we have struggled to secure the funding we need to support our girls.  We launched our 2012 Summer of Code to serve two parallel goals: to meet the growing demand for our unique and disruptive program model by expanding beyond the San Francisco bay area and teaching more than 300 students the basics of computer programming; and to engage our base of supporters from the GROUND UP to help create meaningful change for girls in our society.  As the founder of BlackGirlsCODE I continue to be encouraged each and every day by the girls we serve and steadfastly believe that we have truly MADE A DIFFERENCE. There are certainly many worthy causes in the "sea of turmoil" in our world today.  Yet I believe strongly that it is both important and necessary that we invest in our youth and our girls.  These young bright minds are a precious and undervalued commodity that we must continue to cultivate and grow.  They are the future.  They are the hope.  They are the DREAMS OF TOMORROW. 

With gratitude,
~Kimberly Bryant

Founder, BlackGirlsCODE 

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1757 Comments

In Celebration of the 2012 MLK Holiday ~"A Unique Dream" by Kai (Black Girls Code)

1/13/2012

1220 Comments

 
A Unique Dream
by kai
The “American Dream” is what we all work for and imagine
It’s the opportunity for prosperity and success
 To be able to do anything or be anything we set our minds to
 The right for every man, woman, and child
It’s the opportunity for prosperity and success
To be capable of following our dreams and achieving success 
Aspiring to be the best in every sense of the word, successful, accomplished
To be able to do anything or be anything that we set our minds to
By exerting ourselves and not hiding
We can be leaders, engineers, doctors, computer scientists
even President 
whatever we please
The right for every man, woman, and child Without race, nor our financial state blocking the path to our image of perfection
Material, spiritual, educational,
 every person has a unique
 “American Dream”
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1220 Comments

My Techie Summer

8/5/2011

0 Comments

 
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Hi,
My name is Kai and this summer I had a mission to become a game creator. My adventure started with attending the 
Digital Media Arts Academy at Stanford University.  There I took a course on 2d and 4d game ceation. During class we were given our own game theme nick names; my name was Zelda :P.  Some of my classmates chose names as complicated as a series of numbers (that I still to this day cannot remember!) to names as easy as "No Name". We learned to make all different types of 2d games including, Multi player, Catch the Fruit, Platformers, etc.  
 
After the first day of class, our teacher (Nick) said he would give us tickets for the class raffle at the end of the week when we answered game related questions, helped other people with their games, or won a competition for the best game.  After that of course everyone was VERY helpful and VERY competitive to rack up those raffle tickets!  We kept learning how to make different types of games using Multimedia Fusion 2. The last two days of the week we spent some time learning to use a game design program called Sandbox. When using Sandbox we could create a world of our own and we were each given our own little monkey character that we could use to run around our own worlds or browse other people's worlds. The last day of camp was a scramble to rack up some last minute tickets for the raffle later in the day. On the final day of camp we showed our parents our personalized games, after this was the much waited for raffle. We kids could put as many tickets as we wanted on any item. After this exciting raffle we were each given our own certificate of completion!
 
The camp has given me a wonderful experience that I will never forget. I have been interested in gaming for most of my life, but what got me interested in building games was when my mom started coding. I thought that I could make a game just like my favorite game World of Warcraft, but then I realized that World of Warcraft is a really hard game to make.   So I am trying to make my way up to my ultimate goal
of creating a game like WoW.  The hardest thing I learned about in class was making each game and trying to do it without any glitches :(.   This may sound easy but is in fact very hard because you have to remember everything the teacher showed you and then do it yourself.  Overall my summer game building class was GREAT and I am still practicing all the things that I learned.  I am already planning to come back again next year to learn Maya.  But most of all I am still focused on learning as much as I can so that I can reach my ultimate goal--- a game way cooler than World of Warcraft!  
                
 ~kai 
Guest Blogger 
(A 12 year old budding Ninja Coder)

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0 Comments

In Search of a Black Mark Zuckerberg: Why I Founded Black Girls Code

4/10/2011

2004 Comments

 
Let’s face the facts.  For many young blacks and Hispanics in America, tech is just not...cool.  Sure, these same young people dominate the Twitterverse and the pages of Facebook.  They are definitely experts in the various forms of gaming diversions from Xbox to Nintendo. A recent report by Nielsen even suggests that African Americans and Hispanics dominate the mobile marketplace and are early adopters of new technology.  However, the concept of pulling back the curtain to any of these forms of technology -- becoming a “creator” rather than merely a “consumer” -- is as alien to many of these youth as backpacking through Istanbul.  Technology, on the surface, they know.  Technology as a creation tool? Not so much. 

In the latest installment of CNN’s pivotal docudrama Black in America 4- the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley, CNN correspondents follow a group of eight black and female founders from the NewMe Accelerator as they attempt to launch their fledgling companies by pitching their ideas to a series of investors throughout Silicon Valley.  These savvy entrepreneurs are met by roadblocks at every turn. Perhaps one of the most chilling blows is dealt when TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington states, “I don’t know any Black founders.”  Really?  In fact, black and brown tech pioneers such as John Thompson (former IBM Vice President and Symantec CEO), Gerald Lawson (now deceased he was creator of the first video game cartridge for Fairchild Semiconductor and the only black member of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 80’s with fellow members Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founders of Apple), and Frank Greene (now deceased he was a Silicon Valley pioneer and founder of Technology Development Corporation) have been making strides and outstanding contributions to the technology ecosphere for several decades. Blacks have also been pivotal in the Web2.0 internet explosion, with tech founders such as Omar Wasow of BlackPlanet creating one of the largest social networks to enter the social media space specifically targeting black consumers. 

The sad reality is that these pioneers are often “invisible” to popular culture.  While tech giants such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs become iconic and revered for their technological achievements, black and brown founders often struggle for both recognition and advancement in the booming technological ecosphere.

This lack of visibility has a very direct impact on youth from underrepresented communities.  Most African American and Hispanic youth idolize the entertainment and sports figures which have dominated popular culture; allowing Jay-Z, Lebron James, Russell Simmons, etc. to become the defacto role models to which many of our young people aspire to emulate. As a result, a focus on technology and science pursuits is eschewed for a one in a million chance of becoming the next rap/sports mogul.

My dream of starting BlackGirlsCode -- an organization focused on introducing girls of color from underrepresented communities to technology and entrepreneurship -- was born out of this frustration that “blacks in tech” are often the unmitigated invisible men (and women) in the room. We are not only invisible in theory to tech pundits such as Michael Arrington and the like; our numbers are actually so miniscule within the tech industry that we are virtually non-existent as potential role models for the thousands of African American and Hispanic youth who will be the majority of the domestic workforce within the next decade.

In his pivotal Washington Post article, “We need a Black Mark Zuckerberg” Stanford educator Vivek Wadhwa states;

“We can both improve the quality of U.S. innovation and uplift disadvantaged communities by mentoring minorities.  Ultimately, we are going to have to increase the numbers of blacks and Hispanics studying engineering and science.  Nothing will accelerate this trend more than the success of other members of these minority groups.”

 

Young people of color need role models who are a reflection of themselves to prove that success in technology and other traditional STEM fields is possible and that it is cool to be a techie.  Of course tech is not “cool” if none of the movers and shakers looks like you.  It becomes a goal that is unreachable and a self-fulfilling prophecy is set in motion.  There are no visibly successful black tech founders or CEOs, so young people don’t consider the field of technology as a viable option and decide not to pursue an education in STEM fields, as a result there are too few black technologists in the pipeline to become the future Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. 

This problem of limited representation is just as striking for women in technology as for other underrepresented minorities.  In fact the number of women receiving degrees in software engineering decreased from roughly 40% of degree recipients in the mid-80’s to less than 20% of degree holders today. 

Having received my degree in Electrical Engineering some years ago, I am all too familiar with the sting of being the “one and only” throughout my career.  It is a solitary and lonely road that many women often chose to abandon when they find their careers progressing at a slower trajectory than that of their male peers. Being both black and female? Well, the struggle to reach a level of success can become even more daunting.

As Vivek states in his Wapo article, organizations such as the NewMe Accelerator, and I would add technical educational organizations such as BlackGirlsCode, YouthAppLabs (http://www.youthapplab.com) in Washington, DC,  LearntoTeach (http://learn2teach.org) in Boston, Massachusetts, and HackChange (http://www.hackchange.com) in New York City, have the ability to both drive and improve the quality of US innovation while uplifting underrepresented communities. As society becomes increasingly more technologically driven, it is imperative that our young people have the skills required to compete and thrive in the new millennium economy.   The ability to code and fully utilize all of the technological tools at their disposable is an extremely important skill set for young people to possess.

I founded BlackGirlsCode with the specific goal of creating opportunities for girls of color to envision themselves as the “masters of their technological universe”.  I am in search of the next (Black) Mark Zuckerberg.  Above all I am hopeful that she will forge a NEW pathway towards innovation and social impact that will change the equation for future generations of black and brown creators and leaders in technology.  It is a mission that is long overdue.



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Kimberly Bryant
Founder, BlackGirlsCode

2004 Comments

    Author

    Kimberly Bryant
    Founder, BlackGirlsCode.com

    Follow @blackgirlscode

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