So in 2019, Code/Art started training public school art (and some tech) teachers in partnership with the Miami-Dade School District. Teachers who volunteer for the training can satisfy continuing education requirements by learning four lessons: an abstract art generator and donut maker game in Scratch, coding self-portraits using JavaScript, and 3-D modeling on Tinkercad.

To create a comfortable learning atmosphere, facilitators are open about their own struggles and encourage the teachers to tap into each other’s knowledge and experience. They are assisted by college-age interns, who are then available to help in the classroom.

“They’re very patient, and explain things clearly and easily,” says art educator Edna Chueiri. “If a third grader can do it, we can do it.”

There’s no other model like Code/Art in the country. To date, they’ve trained teachers from 100 schools, 68% of those being Title 1 schools. Still, coding your own nose is one thing. Teaching kids to do theirs is another. A little less than half of teachers have implemented the lessons, although Renshaw believes that more have simply gotten hung up in paperwork when reporting back to Code/Art.

During the pandemic, with the shift to virtual, momentum has inevitably slowed down—56 teachers participated in the training in 2020 compared to 109 in-person the year before. But for Mastronardi, the pandemic was as good a time as any to try the lessons with her second through fifth graders. Other art teachers who struggled to engage their students said the same. Turns out, the Miami-Dade school district lending out 105,000 laptops worked in their favor.

Read the full article about teaching girls to code by Celeste Hamilton Dennis at The 74.