As we gear up for our After School Coding Clubs once again, we want to take a minute, or two, to acknowledge the power that coding clubs have on our students.
Last year was a great year of opportunity and growth for Youth Code Jam. We were able to grow and bring back our in-person Community Jam after making it virtual the past two years. We worked with some amazing community partners and volunteers and want to take a moment to look back on all we have accomplished together.
In 2022, we organized a total of 9 after-school clubs with 6 of those clubs being at schools, 2 virtual, and 1 at Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas. With these clubs, we were able to reach a total of 407 kids. That’s 407 kids we saw on a regular basis, helping them learn how coding can be fun and creative, and not just 1’s and 0’s on a computer screen (though, that can be fun too).
After our clubs finished, we found that 96% of our students saw themselves working in a computing type field. On top of that, 92% of our after school coding club students felt an increase in their ability to create things with computers, which we could see throughout the year as our students created their final projects for the year.
For the 2022 year, we partnered and collaborated on 11 coding camps with Palo Alto College, CS4SA, Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas, Southwest Research Institute, Autism Community Network, and the Spurs. Our camps are a way for students to get in-depth and hands-on experience with different computer technologies, as well as meet other students who share their interests. Each camp has a project component where students can work together or individually to showcase what they learned from the camp.
Through our camps, we were able to serve 151 kids with 50% of them feeling more confident in their abilities to their coding abilities after camp ended. We also found that 81% of our campers felt like they belonged in computer science after completing camp, while 92% of campers found computer science to actually be kind of cool.
A Code Jam is a free event that allows all students and their grown-ups to explore coding and technology in an inclusive and interactive environment. In 2022, we put together 1 Community Code Jam and 1 Mini Code Jam that we did with the Spurs. Between the Code Jams, we saw 315 kids and guardians come through our event with 100% of those participants learning something new. After leaving our event, 98% participants were interested in learning more about coding and 91% said they were interested in learning about jobs in the field.
Youth Code Jam wouldn’t be where it is today without the help of our amazing volunteers! From our volunteer board to the volunteers who help at our events, to the ones that help us spread the word, we can’t do any of this without their helping hands. Last year, our 150 volunteers contributed 839 hours to our organization. That’s a lot of people taking their time out of their busy work day to help us in different ways.
Over all our programs, were able to help bring and show what coding can really do to 1,777 kids throughout San Antonio and online. We also spent a total of 6,132 hours coding our brains out, all in the name of computer science. As we are well into 2023, we are continuing our drive to create inclusive opportunities for all youth to experience computer science and explore with code. We’ll be back with some more of our statistics next year, but for now you can look through more of our 2022 stats by clicking the button below.
