Introduction
For the past three years, I have run a coding camp with the ACCESS center for Vancouver’s Urban Indigenous community. This has been actively supported by ProCogia and our customers, who have provided consultant time to run the camp with support from volunteers from UBC. Around 30 young people have come through the camp to date, and as I write this ProCogia has welcomed an intern for the summer who was a former coding camp attendee. It has been a pleasure to see those who had never coded before gain self-confidence with Python, as well as seeing incredible coding ability from some of the young people.
Motivation
When I started at ProCogia our office was in a coworking space in central Vancouver. There were regular social events for all the various coworking space workers. In none of these events were mentioned the local First Nations or Indigenous people, and I didn’t knowingly meet any, either. This may have been ignorance on my part, and I am sure that contributed, but nonetheless this made me uncomfortable. I started talking to local First Nations and Urban Indigenous youth groups to see if there was anything we could do to try to increase engagement with the tech sector.
Initial Partnership
These conversations led me to ACCESS, a fantastic career center in Vancouver’s East Village district. We quickly landed on the idea of running a coding camp. The goal was to introduce young people to programming who might not have had the chance at school, or who wanted to understand what working as a data scientist or data analyst might look like. In the summer of 2022, we ran the first camp. It took the young people through fundamental Python syntax to plotting with Matplotlib and handling data with Pandas. We had fantastic feedback from the attendees, including one person stating that if we were unavailable for next year they should pay us to run the camp!
This year the board was a little bit too low!
Introduction of Lego
When reviewing this year’s program, ACCESS told us they had several Lego Spike robotics kits. This was exciting news since it gave us a chance to play with Lego! Of course, we had to get our own kit so that we could prepare the program. Now each day includes working with Python to understand programming fundamentals in the morning and an application of the ideas they had learned in the morning to programming a Lego robot that they built. The Lego was fantastic, since people who might have needed extra support with Python excelled at the Lego programming interface, and vice versa! It was extremely satisfying to see how proud the young people were when they got their robot to achieve the task they had been set. I am excited to refine this part of the program for next year.
Lego roboticists hard at work
Conclusion
Teaching is a great way to test your own understanding, to work on your presentation skills, as well as developing mentoring skills which I have found invaluable when managing direct reports. More importantly than that, though, it has been hugely rewarding to get to talk to and spark a bit of excitement for programming in the camp attendees. I am so pleased that the relationship between ACCESS and ProCogia has deepened to include internships this year, and I hope this continues into the future. A final bonus has been that I now have a sweet Lego robotics kit that I can use at home!
