For the average teen, summer is precious time away from school to play, travel, or start a summer job.
It’s hard to imagine something that could entice a high school student enough to forgo trips and recreation to head back into the classroom for nine weeks between June and August.
For about 100 Granite School District students, the incentive for school in the summer was a free computer coding class that would otherwise carry a $10,000 price tag.
With generous financial assistance from the Success in Education Foundation, the district partnered with the tech trainers at Pluralsight to introduce interested students to the fundamentals of crafting mobile apps, web apps and websites. Two class sites – one at Granger High and one at Olympus High – allowed students from all across the district to apply and participate.
Both sites were staffed with a coding mentor from Pluralsight and a CTE instructor from Granite School District. The course was also dotted with field trips to tech companies in the area, which allowed the students to see how coding works in a real world setting.
“Businesses are having a difficult time filling certain tech jobs in the industry,” said assistant superintendent Linda Mariotti. “This course helps these students get their foot in the door to in-demand jobs.”
Participation in the course took a bit of sacrificing. Students were required to attend every 4-hour session from Monday through Thursday during the nine weeks. There was no getting out of class for family vacations or summer camps.
“They had to be committed,” Mariotti said. “They had some holidays here and there, but many of them chose to give up family trips and camps.”
They may have lost time at the beach, but they gained vital industry skills by learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AngularJS coding. Not many of their peers can claim to know how to design applications from iOS or Ruby.
This opportunity would have cost a pretty penny in any other situation. We are delighted that so many of our students had the chance to boost their abilities.
Administrators hope the course can be expanded to more students in the coming years.
This is wonderful. Will this be available for students next summer? I would love for my daughter to take part in this training. Thanks
The Code to Success program is expected to be expanded next summer. Be on the lookout for the application process in the spring or late winter.
This is a first hand account from a student that attended over the summer.
If you want your student to spend 4 hours a day watching video tutorials with no live teaching take this class.
If you want your student to be promised a “$10,000” scholarship that is never obtained, take this class! We were promised a $10k scholarship and all we received were licenses for online tutorials that the Code To Success Program got for FREE.
DO NOT ATTEND
We are saddened to hear that. We received very positive feedback from most of the 90+ students who received certificates for completing the coursework, and many have expressed a desire to become mentors for upcoming sessions.
Yes, I very much enjoyed the course! I feel it advanced my knowledge in web development, even though my focus is on cyber-security, I learned where most vulnerabilities on websites lie (that being XSS).