Hollis Montessori School's Adolescent Program’s FIRST Tech Challenge team had one heck of a year. In addition to teaching themselves Java, they won two statewide awards, and ran 4 after-school camps to raise funds for their team.
Since the team members had minimal Java knowledge, they were “worried that we wouldn't be able to design and program a competitive robot. On our quest to find Java resources, we encountered CodeGym and we immediately knew that this is what we needed.”
CodeGym is an interactive practice-oriented Java programming course. The course is valuable for absolute beginners as well as software developers who want to expand their skills. The developers of the course use compelling teaching techniques — visualization, storytelling, games, etc. — to make learning more effective and fun. CodeGym includes 1200 practical tasks, starting from the very first lesson, and a total of 500+ hours of Java practice to boost your programming skills.
With the help of CodeGym, says team member Pranai Rao, “we were able to efficiently learn Java in a way that we could comprehend so that we could apply it to our robot.”
Team Member Ben Jedlinsky working with Camp Infinity attendees.
Part of FIRST Tech Challenge team responsibilities is obtaining funds to sustain their teams. This can be done through grants, fundraising, and sponsorships. Reaching out to CodeGym to sponsor them allowed the team to learn necessary skills as well as helping to support the team itself. But the team wanted to go even further, and
use their new knowledge to reach out to the community as well as raising funds. They put together an ambitious slate of after-school camps that they held this spring.The team ran camps for kids from 7 years old and up that introduced Web Design (HTML+CSS), Python, FIRST LEGO League, and CAD Design.
Team members Helen Saunders and Pranai Rao teaching at Camp Infinity.
“Running the camps had a few bumps but everything worked out great in the end,” reports Pranai. “We've heard from students that they really enjoyed the camp. Intro to FIRST LEGO League sparked interest to restart the team at HMS. The camp served its role in raising funds to support the FTC team, bestow fundamental STEM and FIRST skills in younger students, and inspire students to participate in FIRST activities.”
Since CodeGym is available from anywhere in the world, the team didn’t realize that the company is actually based in Ukraine “until they sent out messages in their newsletter saying that their employees were not harmed in the bombings, that they were currently safe in bomb shelters and that they would continue to work in the shelters.” The company is now running a campaign to raise funds to donate Java courses to Ukrainians who have lost their jobs so they can start new careers.
“To date, CodeGym has not shut down since the start of the war,” says Pranai, “they've resiliently continued working in bomb shelters with air raid sirens having gone off every hour.”
