Black Girls Code is a non-profit organization that provides young girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills in technology and computer programming at a time when they are naturally thinking about their future professions. Black Girls Code holds workshops, summer camps and week-long events for girls from ages 7 to 17 in a few states in the USA as well as in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Spacebar Technologies recently partnered with Black Girls Code for their “DC Mobile App Workshop” that took place on the campus of University of Maryland College Park on September 26-27. Clifford Agyei-Mensah and Van Phan, members of Spacebar’s Application Development Team, volunteered at this amazing event.
The workshop focused on building apps on an Android platform using MIT’s AppInventor, which is similar to Scratch. Scratch is a programming language and an online community where children can program and share interactive media such as stories, games, and animation with people from all over the world. As children create with Scratch, they learn to think creatively, work collaboratively, and reason systematically. One of the challenges Black Girls Code placed upon the participants was to program a mobile app that would playback in a computerized voice a message they wrote whenever they shook their phone.
Our Spacebar volunteers reported that they enjoyed helping the participants to navigate the logic and guide them in discovering the solution to the imposed challenges. Some of them were familiar with the tools and very good at expressing their ideas to instructors, volunteers and other participants. Clifford and Van both recommend you to volunteer or sign up someone you know for the next Black Girls Code event where they embrace learning and teaching in a fun and exciting atmosphere.
Please visit www.blackgirlscode.com for more information on the organization and event schedule
Leave a Reply