Dear Friends,
It’s been 9 years since omegaUp.com opened its virtual doors to Spanish-speaking students who wanted to improve their Computer Science skills by solving coding challenges and competing in programming contests. A long time has passed since the first student, the first programming contest, the first teacher and the first school trusted in our platform to improve the quality of their education. While many characteristics of omegaUp.com have changed throughout the years, there is one thing that has remained constant: our strong commitment to democratize access to high quality Computer Science materials and tools in the Latin American community.
The world has significantly changed in the past 6 months. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all of our lives in one way or another. In the educational sector schools, teachers and parents have had to learn to cope with the challenges of the new reality of distance learning. As a non-profit organization with experience in online education, omegaUp now has a special responsibility to help our communities in need.
Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we are happy to report that during 2020 we were able to provide omegaUp.com as a free educational platform to 26,674 students from many countries in Latin America, with 81% of our users residing in Mexico. Our platform automatically provided feedback to 239,124 coding solutions to challenges, a 26% increase with respect the previous year.
We are also very proud to announce that omegaUp is reaching more places than ever before. Students and teachers from 332 active schools used omegaUp during the past year, a 66% increase from 2019. This is not a coincidence, as our top strategic priority has been to help high school and university computer science teachers with a comprehensive, easy to use and free platform to manage their coursework — including lessons, coding activities and exams.
Throughout the years we have seen talented students from many small schools and communities in Mexico thrive, as documented by “Historias omegaUp”. We are strong believers that the same positive effect can be achieved in other countries as well. In 2020 we aimed to increase our participation in the region by creating the first Central America Programming Cup, giving Chromebooks as prizes to top competitors. Since then, participation in omegaUp.com by students from El Salvador has increased by 255% (+643), Guatemala 1,586% (+698) and Honduras 2,486% (+572). We are hoping these efforts will be the beginning of a strong community of future software engineers.
Adoption numbers have little impact on our educational mission if they are not accompanied by appropriate and engaging materials. A core strategic priority of 2020 was to increase the quality of the content provided by the platform. In May we released a full redesign of the omegaUp.com site, making it easier to use for students and teachers new to the platform. During this year we also released three new courses: Introduction to C++ and Introduction to Algorithms parts 1 & 2. These courses are in Spanish and include lessons and exercises for students to learn at their own pace. We also launched an introductory course to Python in collaboration with Future Labs, which is not only available on omegaUp.com but also was taught by volunteers on nine livestream sessions through Facebook Live last summer — which was viewed by hundreds of students.
The investments we made in educational content resulted in a 53% increase in the average omegaUp user session duration as compared to 2019. This is a significant achievement for us as we are committed to continue increasing our efforts in this direction.
Gender diversity continues to be one of the key challenges in the industry. As a platform widely used in many schools, we have a significant responsibility to positively contribute to addressing this problem. This year we launched the program Coder of the Month for Women, where we recognize the top monthly female participant in our platform with a mentorship and a programming book. Despite our efforts, only 25% of omegaUp users are women. We acknowledge that we still have a long way to go in order to take the participation numbers closer to where it needs to be.
The pandemic and stay at home orders forced us to re-think aspects of our social programs. We started the #StayAtHomeWithOmegaUp campaign to help our community of teachers and students with the general transition to remote school. As part of this initiative we organized 11 Career Experiences talks that were streamed on Facebook Live to more than 300 students. Latinx engineers from companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft graciously volunteered their time to talk with students about their experiences in the industry, sharing tips and motivating the next generation of talent.
As a part of our Stay At Home initiative, we also started the omegaUp Programming League, a series of coding competitions that are open to everyone to participate. The results were incredible; we had 800 students registered for the 6 rounds of the league. To increase awareness and motivate other students to participate, we organized a livestream during the final round with experienced coders who narrated the contest updates, explained the solutions to the problems to the general public and announced the winners. The results were very positive with 200 viewers in attendance, including other students, teachers and parents supporting their competitors.
We have more to showcase than just the successes of our students. In order to motivate and reach as many professors as possible, we started the program Education Pillars (Pilares de la Educación): a series of live conferences by Computer Science professors in high schools and universities who have used omegaUp for many years. To date, we have organized five talks and heard many success stories — like the increasing achievements of Baja California, Mexico by Dra. Eloisa García, Professor of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and Founding Member of AI Mexico. We could not be more proud to be contributing to the efforts of many enthusiastic professors like Dra. Eloisa.
Lastly, 2020 marks the start of one of the most ambitious projects in our organization, the creation of the omegaUp Educational Model: an initiative that aims to help schools and new professors to onboard into the omegaUp platform with ease, which includes a Teachers’ Training Program and peer-reviewed coursework materials that are ready for them to use in the classroom. This year we started a collaboration in Mexico with the Unit of Secondary Education on Technology Industry and Services (UEMSTIS, Unidad de Educación Media Superior Tecnológica Industrial y de Servicios), part of the Mexican Ministry of Public Education (SEP, Secretaría de Educación Pública). The UEMSTIS is the largest high school education provider in Latin America with more than 1.2 million students distributed across the country. The challenge is immense, and we had a successful pilot program in the Fall semester by training 100 high school computer science professors on how to use omegaUp in their classroom to increase engagement and student learning.
None of these achievements would have been possible without the tremendous support of our 31 staff members & volunteers distributed between the United States, Mexico and Perú. To all of you who contributed your time, incredible dedication and effort, a huge Thank You!
Finances
All these results were achieved with an operating budget of only $68,619.74 USD. Out of this total, $58,325.23 (84.5%) went to support our social programs: omegaUp.com (66.5%), Career Experiences, Coder of the Month and Programming Clubs: (15.1% combined) and Central America (2.7%). Our nascent efforts in Educational Content represented 1% of our budget and our hope is to be able to increase these investments in the following years. The following chart summarizes the breakdown of expenses for the Fiscal Year 2020:
We invite you to look at our results through the lens of our shoestring budget. Maintaining and improving an educational platform on which more than 26,000 students and 332 schools depend, now more than ever, is not a small feat. The fact that we have been able to achieve this speaks to the tremendous support we have received from our team of volunteers doing engineering, customer service and support, program management, curriculum development, and training programs, all of them graciously working extra hours, nights and weekends to accomplish our mission.
Based on the number of volunteer hours, our most conservative estimate suggests that our social programs depend on donated volunteer time valued at $310,865USD. While we are enormously grateful for this support, we recognize that such heavy reliance on volunteer time for central services is not sustainable, and we are working with development consultants to increase our fundraising. If you want to help us to keep working towards a more diverse Software Engineering industry by empowering the Latin American community, please make a generous donation today at https://omegaup.org/#donate.
To all our supporters, especially to our teachers: your dedication is what keeps us motivated and inspires us to work every day on accomplishing the omegaUp mission of building the pipeline of top Software Engineering talent in Latin America.
Thank you for all your support,
Joemmanuel Ponce
Co-founder and Executive Director
omegaUp
