As the Tech industry is suffering from a huge lack of talent, and, according to US CTO Megan Smith, heading toward 1 million unfilled IT jobs in the next decade. We need to inspire more youth toward a career in Software Engineering. That’s why we at Holberton decided to launch a 3-week Summer Coding Camp for 15 to 18 years old. Students will not attend class but will be building their first website, following our progressive education methodology focusing on learning by doing.
Tech companies will tour their offices to students, in addition to collaborating with current Holberton students and mentors. Among our mentors is Lamia Himdach, also ChickTech’s San Francisco Bay Area Co-Director, a non-profit organizing fun and hands-on tech events that encourage girls to join the Tech industry.
“I see a lot of Silicon Valley youth, having ironically no clue what Software is. Their friends and family not working in the industry coupled to the absence of computer science classes at their school makes it impossible for them to even think about doing Software for a living.”
GRAMMY award-winning artist NE-YO is also part of the mentor team, he recently joined the school’s Board of Trustees to help attract underrepresented groups to software engineering. NE-YO will be reviewing students progress personally. Following Holberton’s mission to make high quality education accessible to the most, the 3-week camp is totally free and can even accommodate for those who cannot afford transportation and food.
The coding camp will cover the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. All exercises will be done on Ubuntu and their code will be hosted on Github, home of many open source initiatives. Students will learn to build their first website and personalize it to their taste. Mentors from Silicon Valley Tech companies will come to the school to coach them and give feedback on their performance during the demo day.
We are looking forward to the kid’s reaction to the open source world, that is so powerful yet free. We will share their feelings and experiences and more in a later camp wrap-up article.
The camp starts on June 26th and applications are now open!
