Coding for community: New Jersey teens launch coding academy to build community amid COVID-19 Pandemic
By Valerie I
Teen sisters Sharada Suresh, 14, and Harita Suresh, 16, enjoy sports, creative writing, and drawing like most kids their age, but they’re also deeply passionate about serving their community. This ingrained passion inspired them to create their own non-profit, Little Apple Academy, which holds free virtual coding workshops serving hundreds of young people in over 130 countries.
Getting started with Scratch
As the daughters of two computer programmers, the Suresh sisters were surrounded by computers growing up in their New Jersey home. The pair says they always wanted to express themselves through game programming but couldn’t do so until their father encouraged them to explore the Scratch offline editor. “He said, ‘here is a place where you guys can play and have fun and design as you want to.’ We liked that,” Harita Suresh recalls.
“What we loved about Scratch back then was that it allowed us to create cartoons and video games on our computers,” she says. “It was a free space where we could choose what we liked to do. Scratch taught us the basic programming concepts such as variables, loops, and if-statements in a gamified way that made it feel like we weren’t learning.”
They soon learned there was even more magic beyond the Scratch editor once they immersed themselves in the community.
When they matured, their parents permitted them to use the Scratch online platform to connect with other Scratchers. “The online editor was useful because we could see how everyone else was working and how they programmed and made their structures,” Harita Suresh shared. “If we ever had questions, we could always come to the online community with our queries about what wasn’t working out as we wanted.”
She shared how supportive communities can dramatically impact young people’s confidence in their ability to code.
“Community plays a big role in how you perceive programming from a young age. If kids had an opportunity to belong to a community that supports them in programming by allowing them to explore while reminding them that they are not alone or struggling by themselves because they have a community to help them, then you’re making [coding] more accessible. That’s the environment we wanted to foster in our classes at Little Apple Academy.”
Building Community
When the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic struck, Harita and Sharada Suresh were in the eighth and sixth grades, respectively. As the educational and digital divides widened among historically marginalized groups in underresourced areas, an air of uncertainty loomed around the world. The Suresh sisters were reminded of the countless instances when their online and local communities supported them in times of difficulty and uncertainty. They sought to give back to their community by replicating that same web of support and safety for other young people in Jersey City and beyond.
They started with Facebook and Eventbrite pages to market their coding classes to parents. As the classes grew in popularity, they launched the official webpage for their peer-teaching initiative, Little Apple Academy, a virtual coding academy with a mission to “open the doors to the endless magic of coding through interactive and innovative classes.” Their website reads, “In these challenging times, we want to keep the doors of knowledge open by introducing little minds to the art of coding.”
Today, their courses have opened doors for more young people than they could have imagined.
“We have students join us from all around the world; some are even working as late as midnight [in their timezones],” Harita says. “When I’m down and don’t feel like doing my best, I see these kids, and they’re like, ‘I can stay up until midnight because I want to pursue computer science, I want to improve myself, I want to see my skills grow,’ Harita Suresh says. “I’m like, wow, they’re inspiring, I’m going to make sure that I give them the best experience that I can give them, and that’s the best part.”
“Everyone in our class is super respectful, and they love bouncing ideas off each other,” Sharada Suresh added. “Sometimes in the chat, I’ll see if someone has a question, and before I can answer, another person will be like, ‘You can try this, I did this with mine,’ or ‘I included these colors, and I represented my culture like this.”
Students at Little Apple Academy can opt into a series of five-day classes or one-day workshops where they are taught a new Scratch project in every session. Each session begins with introductions and check-ins about how each person feels.
“We do this to get the students to relax because sometimes some students may [have this idea that] they need to be perfect, and we’re not about that at all. We want you to be able to ask us comfortably if you have questions,” Harita says.
Sharada Suresh says they teach through open-ended prompts with three rules every student should follow: have fun, ask questions, and express themselves.
“Some of our favorite projects that we made on Scratch are not the complicated ones,” she says. “Our favorites are the ones that we can introduce to students very easily, for them to first grasp Scratch before they go on to create these amazing games by themselves.”
“We have a name project where students write their names in Scratch using different letters, and then they add extra effects to those letters,” she says. “Some may make them spin, and some may make them bounce around everywhere…This is one of the most fun projects to watch because every student expresses themselves differently.”
A lifelong impact
Both sisters say this approach is designed to instill confidence in their students that is transferable to anything they decide to do in life, whether related to coding — or not.
“The technology job market is rapidly increasing and quite high paying,” Harita Suresh says. “Students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, and haven’t had the opportunity to explore programming when they were younger, may not be inclined to take those jobs when they’re older because they won’t have the confidence…through Little Apple Academy, we aim to show them that programming is not scary at all. It’s just like what you’ve been doing in Scratch. It’s just like what you’ve been doing in these classes, and you’ll continue to do that into the future. And we’ve seen through all the students who come to our class that they leave feeling just a bit more excited about programming, just a bit more inspired to take that step.”
All proceeds from Little Apple Academy specialty courses help fund the Suresh sisters’ Get Warmr initiative, where they provide handmade crochet, scarves, and baby hats to local hospitals and homeless shelters in their area. They also deliver brown bag lunches to local homeless shelters in their area.
You can learn more about Little Apple Academy at www.LittleAppleAcademy.com.
