By Priya Sinha
When we first established SOWCoders USA, we had many ideas in mind. There were so many projects we wanted to fulfill and were excited to get started. However, our biggest project that we planned on hosting was a camp. Camps are an important part of summer and can help a person get ahead of inspiring them to set out on new adventures. So, we decided that in the summer of 2022, we were going to host a summer camp. We didn’t have any details or information about how we were going to do it then. It was just an idea. It wasn’t until January of 2022 that we started to get more serious about the plan.
In January, during our winter break, Alyssa, Charlotte, and I [Priya] got together to work on our chapter and club in West Hartford. After we had finished putting together posters and planning for Secret Snowflake which was our fundraiser, we decided to start thinking ahead about what the rest of the school year and summer would look like. That’s when I brought up the camp again. As soon as I brought it up, many questions arose. What would the camp look like with Covid-19? Will we be able to have it in-person? It would be difficult to gather everyone together in one place, and since this camp was focused on girls and those who identify as nonbinary from under-resourced areas, it may be hard for them to travel to one location. Alongside that challenge, having it every day in a row for two weeks would be really difficult. However, I knew I wanted to make it happen more than anything. I was determined to see it happen. I brought it up again and this is when we started planning.
First, we decided to contact some professionals who have some experience in putting together these types of camps. I started off by emailing a list of Directors of leisure and recreational services from different towns to ask if they had any tips on how to start. We got responses from a few, and their advice inspired us to keep moving forward. The Director from our town got us connected with our teen services librarian director. She emailed asking how she could help and that’s when everything got more serious. I started to think about how I wanted the camp to run and what days it would be on. To work alongside everyone’s schedules, I decided it would be for the month of July every Saturday and instead of in-person, it would be virtual so anyone could join from anywhere. It would be from 4:30-6:30 PM and we would have guest speakers. After I had detailed the logistics, I drafted a camp schedule and a checklist, alongside making a folder with everything in it. I started to look at other options for help. I had a friend named Akshaya who had the same interest in coding as I did, so I invited her to help be a part of it. Together, we started emailing professors and professionals that would be interested in speaking at our camp. Unfortunately, due to the rigorous schedule professors have, we weren’t able to find a professor but found three women who have worked with the CEO of SowCoders to be our speakers. I was also able to get into contact with the supervisor for the Computer Science Department in our district, Jackie Corricelli, to have her speak after previously working with her. For our last speaker, Ananya Radhakrishnan, who is a Computer Science major at Northeastern offered to speak. We had our speakers lined up, now it was time to think curriculum-wise.
After some time, Alyssa decided to join us and all three of us started to think about what we wanted to teach. Since we taught HTML/CSS in our club, we decided we would construct an HTML/CSS curriculum. This curriculum would help students create a website based on a topic they deemed important in society. We also started to think about our audience. We didn’t want students too young, but we also felt that we shouldn’t limit anyone’s learning. We decided it would be open to all ages and we would help anyone who needs extra help.
With months of planning and communicating, fast forward to May. This was the month that would matter the most. This is when a lot of parents would start looking for summer activities for their kids. We decided to start advertising a lot around then. We put up posters everywhere, had our teachers post Google Classroom Announcements, and our program was put on the library website. We also posted a lot on our social media and had our media manager put out an Ad on our town’s Facebook community page. All this attraction led to 50 sign-ups and participants!
Finally, it’s July and our first meeting arrives. All our hard work and dedication finally led up to that moment. However, it was all worth it. Future Coders Without Barriers took a lot of work, but the smiles on the faces of our students were all worth it. Thank you to all our guest speakers and everyone who has supported us! Moral of the story: don’t give up on what you believe in. You can make anything you want to happen even if there are a lot of roadblocks.
Check out some model projects from our camp: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YwTpSrC7YxTSqtjoDE-oap1Z-KLwHAskT3FzJ-oAq7Y/edit?usp=sharing