The Language of the Future is at Compass NOW!
March 3rd, 2020
The Girls Who Code venture shows Compass’s drive to feed the pipeline of female engineers in the United States.
Adults at Compass Community Collaborative School have seen some serious changes in technology over their lifetimes. Some of them worked with the first classroom computers, which featured green or orange monochromatic text, and that’s about it. They had very little processing speed or memory. Today, our school’s enjoy touch screen televisions with built in web browsers and wireless keyboards to control that technology from anywhere in the room, and there are more colors available than our eyes can even see! The common link between those dinosaurs of the digital age and our smart-classrooms is coding. They have to be programmed to do whatever we are wanting them to do. AND Computers are everywhere—in our pockets, cars, even our coffee makers. Light bulbs are being outfitted with computers to make them more efficient, as part of a house full of small computers all coordinating with each other to save a homeowner money. Skateboards have onboard computers!
Girls Who Code is opening new horizons for our students!
Additionally, upper school students are working this quarter in a Venture class, “Game Addiction,” to use their love of gaming to develop the coding skills needed for almost all of today’s technologies. One student shared that he was developing a game to “blow things up.” When asked what kinds of things, the coding student du jour chuckled and said, “penguins…and other stuff!” On the surface, it might not seem obvious how this relates to a world of coding as employment, unless you understand the market for games where players blow things up. It’s huge! Every social media application has entire teams of coders working to respond to users' demands or to develop new functions that no one even knows they need…yet. So, learning to code a game where users blow up…things…is an enjoyable, applicable and employable skill.
Karen lends a hand to a high school coder.