Success code: LINC student create online games, spark future aspirations
LINC students at King Elementary in the Kansas City Public Schools pose with teachers and suppoerters as they display certificates from the CodeAlgo Academy coding program.
After some four months of weekly after-school workshops, demonstration day arrived for a dozen LINC students at King Elementary School.
In turn at the front of the room, students each put their avatars into play on the big screen, sending their creations running and leaping through alien worlds out of their own imaginations.
And then, a little enticement.
Sedric Hibler, one of the instructors from CodeAlgo Academy in Kansas City, put a question back on the students:
How much money do you think you can make as a coder creating games?
The fact that the students had kept working over several months at learning about the role of computer coding — and that they were now curious of its rewards as a career — is exactly what Hibler and the partners who brought the program to LINC wanted to hear.
The answer, of course, was millions of dollars.
“So keep on building,” Hibler said. “That’s how you get good. That’s how you associate with the possible things you can do for money.”
Hibler and his CodeAlgo co-founder Triumfia Fulks taught the class at King with Dadja Batale. of Phierx.Tech, with funding support from the National Alliance of Faith and Justice and its POP (Pen or Pencil) mentoring program.
It was an important opportunity, said LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Darryl Bush, for the LINC students at King to see successful people who look like them.
“For the kids to see three Black facilitators — all three of them engineers — gives them positive role models,” Bush said. “The sooner we can get them to know the scholarships that are available and the opportunities available, the better.”
These are the kind of collaborations that fit the mission of the National Alliance of Faith and Justice, said the alliance’s national coordinator, Dr. Janice Cade.
Cade worked with the alliance’s Kansas City POP (Pen or Pencil) liaison Phyllis Ragsdale to pilot the opportunity here. Kansas City Public Schools, with the district’s manager of student experiences, Zandra Winfield, teamed up with LINC to bring it all together after school at King.
Cade, Ragsdale and WInfield were all on hand for the culmination of the pilot, watching the presentations as the students received their CodeAlgo Academy certificates.
“You can see the progress” of the students, Ragsdale said. “You can see how they became more autonomous.”
CodeAlgo used the Roblox game creation system to give the class of beginner designers a taste of what’s possible, Hibler said.
They get a glimpse of the Python coding language as they start building computer literacy. And all along the way, he said, “they get to learn problem-solving.”
“The kids were focused,” Bush said. They’re getting the kind of tools and inspiration that will lead them to a future where they are “financially independent.”
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