“I got it!” Jermiana Cannon exclaimed upon realizing that she could use a “repeat” command to shorten some computer code she’d just written. The exclamation echoed across the room—and signaled hope for New Haven kids aiming for the jobs of the future.
Cannon’s exclamation took place Monday inside a newly refurbished computer lab at the Jefferson Street headquarters of the LEAP youth education and rec program. There, LEAP has dived into a summer experiment into how to close a tech-education gap that leaves girls and urban kids behind in the evolving new economy.
Twelve groups of elementary and middle-schoolers, six to eight kids at a time, are using what LEAP Interim Executive Director Henry Fernandez termed “a pretty cool curriculum” developed by the group code.org to teach young kids the basic concepts of programming.
By 2020, an estimated one million new jobs will exist that require some knowledge of coding. An estimated 12 percent of college students major in computer science, most of them male, disproportionately few of them black or Latino.
LEAP Kids Crack The Code | New Haven Independent
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