Latinitas Code Chica
My professional life started in San Antonio at Hawthorne Academy. I taught 8th Grade math and science to a classroom of a majority Latino students, most of which due to economic hardship qualified for federal assistance to pay for their lunches.
Looking back on my time in the classroom, I wish I knew what I know now. I wish I would have incorporated lessons on entrepreneurship and software engineering into my classroom. I believe my 8th graders from 10 years ago would be better off if I had.
Latinitas is empowering all girls to innovate through media and technology and started the Code Chica program to teach their girls web development. They reached out to us looking for a coding education partner. This was an important opportunity to increase access to technical education for traditionally underserved students.
Austin Coding Academy reached out to its network and found students and instructors to volunteer to assist the inaugural cohort of the Code Chica program. See Latinita’s blog for information on the Code Chica program.
On the opening day of Code Chica class, I spoke to the girls and presented a hypothesis, “learning to code will increase your opportunities in life”. I shared the following statistics:
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment of software developers is projected to grow 24 percent from 2016 to 2026, much faster than the average for all occupations.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median pay for software engineers in the United States was $105,590 in 2018.
These girls have the chance to prove the hypothesis. They can learn to code. They can witness the impact of learning to code on on their lives. Additionally, we discussed a problem our community is experiencing:
- According to the Center for American Progress, 14.7% of Texans fell below the poverty line — $24,340 for a family of four — in 2018. 39.7% of those Texans are African American or Latino.
- According to the NCWIT, about 26% of professional computing jobs in the US are held by women with African-American and Latina women holding only 4% of the professional computing jobs.
I told the girls that they have the opportunity to be the solution to the problem. They can be an example to future generations.
The other day I was exploring Instagram and saw that Latinitas had hired a Graphic Design Summer Intern named Valerie Heras. Valeria was in my 8th Grade math and science classroom back in San Antonio at Hawthorne Academy. How incredible it was to meet again in a professional capacity! It’s so exciting to work with Latinitas to spur this movement and increase access to technical education for as many people as possible.
