TEACHING TWO WAYS

I write code at Codecademy. So, in a sense, you could say I teach here. I think you could say that any of the 60 people on the Codecademy team teach our tens of millions of users to code. It’s Codecademy’s scale that unlocks a 500K student to one ratio.

Scale is essential to Codecademy’s mission. Our fully-automated interactive learning environment has allowed us (a company of roughly 50 employees) to teach tens of millions of people to code over the past six years. We’ve been able to keep prices accessible and offer courses for free.

Part of building our scaled education platform has meant focusing on those who are ready to learn, what they want to know, and then providing it to them. But what about people that aren’t passively searching the internet about learning to code — those that think they’d never want to work in an office or think that they could never swing it? With some students, particularly those coming from a variety of less-privileged backgrounds than my own, it takes more than putting a great website out there to demonstrate that there is a place from them in the tech world.

At Codecademy, we care about these people too, which is why some of my teammates and I volunteer with ScriptEd. We want to help students at under-resourced schools build coding skills, self-confidence in those skills, and increase their job awareness, so they see a brighter future of economic opportunity.

Volunteering at ScriptEd

ScriptEd equips students in under-resourced schools with fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that create access to careers in tech. This is done through in-school programming, field trips, and internships that expose students to software development careers. Eighty-one percent of students are on free or reduced-price lunch, and ScriptEd also works to increase diversity in the engineering community with a student makeup that’s 46% Latinx and 36% black reports the Scripted website.

I volunteer for the the front-end web programming course that teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and developer tools, like IDEs and GitHub. By the end of the students’ first school year, they will be able to create interactive websites.

At ScriptEd, I have the opportunity to contribute on a more personal level. My students tell me about their lives. They get excited and compete for my attention to show off a Spongebob GIF they have added to their website. They make fun of my mustache and my hair. And I stay with that same group of 25 students until they finish the year in June. No 10x, no scale.

But here’s where teaching at ScriptEd truly differs from Codecademy. In my day job, I serve students that know they want to learn to code. These students see themselves in tech and fitting into the community. At ScriptEd, students can be skeptical and reluctant to participate. They likely wouldn’t have benefited from Codecademy on their own no matter how well optimized our learning environment becomes. But what we can’t do from a distance, I like to try my best to in-person.

Earlier this month, one of my students, let’s call her Deidra, entered the classroom completely disinterested. She spent most of the warm-up activity chatting with her friend about how they would rather be somewhere else. I identified with Deidra; I was required to attend classes I thought I had no interest in, too.

The day’s activity was to create a webpage as an invitation to a party. It asked students to develop a theme, create a webpage with images, headers, paragraphs, and, finally, to use their newly learned capabilities with ids and classes to style parts of their webpage. Deidra reluctantly began work on the activity. She found one image and made a header on the page, but promptly drifted off into YouTube. This is the moment when an actual person can step in and where a web page lets you bounce.

I came over and asked her the theme of her party. Deidra said it was a “winter bash.” I asked what other image she might want for an invitation. She said she wanted snowflakes, but as a background for the entire invitation. We hadn’t yet taught background-image or positioning, but I saw her motivation — snowflakes. We proceeded to use CSS positioning properties, sizing properties, and z-index to see how an image in HTML can be manipulated to cover the background.

Sitting down with Deidra took a good amount of our time and produced a lot of “You mean we have to do more?” from Deidra. But, at the end of class, she had an invitation with an image of snowflakes. As she left class, she said, “That was hard!” with a big grin, excited to pick up where she left off tomorrow.

Being there in the classroom with Deidra, I was able to take what motivated her and use it to show her how she can use coding to achieve her interests. Since that day, Deidra brings her own initiative to assignments. She doesn’t seem too bored to complete her work. Moments like this happen almost every class. Each time a student is empowered to turn their creative ideas into reality via coding, they believe a little more in their potential as a coder.

ScriptEd Field Trips

At Codecademy, we also open our door to ScriptEd field trips. Last spring, I brought my ScriptEd class to Codecademy for a tour, lunch, and a panel with some of the team.We had a number of different roles and careers represented: software engineer, designer, product manager, curriculum developer.The students met the people who built a product they’d been using in the classroom. The panelists met some real-world learners.

In our hour-long session, the students learned a little more about the career opportunities open to them in the world, and the panelists learned a little more about what some of our users want to see on our platform.

Bringing ScriptEd students into the office for internships and field trips has inspired other co-workers to get involved as well. This year, Alex, a Codecademy Curriculum Developer, has joined me in teaching at ScriptEd. Like me, he keeps these students in mind as he helps create our upcoming courses.

But, most importantly, the field trip shared a world of opportunities that many of the students were unaware of. In bringing my classes to the office, I hope they saw that working as a coder is far from the classic IT basement myth. The software engineers and various product team members at Codecademy are a dynamic assortment of people with a variety of skills and backgrounds. By seeing this IRL, ScriptEd students get a chance to see how they could be part of a similar working environment.

Internships

This past summer, New York City companies hired 49 ScriptEd interns. Codecademy invited Xhesika and Samuel to revamp our team’s deployment dashboard. Doing so required learning JavaScript technologies like ES6 and ReactJS and working through our Build Front-End Web Apps intensive. We also tried to share a variety of perspectives on life in the coding world by inviting them to daily standups, on coffee trips with employees across the career spectrum, and eating lunch together.

One day, a few team members who majored in computer science had a group discussion with Xhesika and Samuel. They had all kinds of questions for us, like what classes we liked and what subjects are relevant in our day to day as software engineers.

After her internship finished, Xhesika said, “I used this internship as a way to see if I should major in Computer Science in college or go another route, and I have decided I will major in it!” Samuel also decided to pursue computer science in college after the internship. Knowing that their time with us reinforced their confidence in such a major life choice made all the time and effort we put in worth it to me.

This is why working with ScriptEd is so important to me. I’m able to extend the scale of Codecademy by showing those that don’t see a future for themselves in coding that the opportunity is there for them.

It’s the Mission

We at Codecademy teach people the skills they need to find jobs. We care about teaching people and recognize the value of the many ways in which our team members get involved in teaching outside the office. While we work hard at making this mission accessible to all, we understand that this doesn’t reach everyone. Which is why my teammates are excited when ScriptEd students show up at the office. We learn a little more about those just outside our reach, and continue to grow our platform to be a resource learners of all kinds and backgrounds.