Giving Compass' Take:

· EdSurge takes a look at Chicago's Everyone Can Code program and how it is bringing technical training to underrepresented communities.

· What other skills did students learn when enrolled in the program? How is this important for their futures? 

· Check out this article about the importance of coding.

Six weeks ago, they barely knew how to code. But there they were last Thursday—19 students, showcasing their apps under the bright lights of an Apple store in downtown Chicago, in front of a standing room-only crowd that included Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Janice Jackson and Illinois Chief Information Officer Ron Guerrier.

The students were part of One Summer Chicago, a public-private partnership program that provides 32,000 Chicago youth, between the ages of 14 to 24, with paid summer jobs and internships. Two hundred of them participated in Everyone Can Code, an Apple-led education initiative done in collaboration with the mayor’s office, CS4All, Chicago Public Schools and the City Colleges of Chicago.

The Everyone Can Code program offers curriculum and exercises that introduce students to Apple’s programming language, Swift, and its development tools, xCode. They also learn to use an app design journal that provides a framework for building app prototypes.

The event provided students the chance to show what they had learned and built. But they weren’t the only ones who learned a new skill. Marcus Warren, an instructor at Westside Health Authority in the Austin neighborhood on the west side of the city, had no prior coding experience. But when the city’s Department of Family & Support Services approached his organization and presented the opportunity to partake in Everyone Can Code, he volunteered to become an instructor.

To Warren, the program was an opportunity to bring technical training to underrepresented communities: “I figured if I could learn it, I could teach it too.”

Read the full article about Chicago's Everyone Can Code program by Jin-Soo Huh at EdSurge.