Coding Culture

This is the story of how a self-identified technologically illiterate and 26 year old “grandma” (yes, that was my nickname in college) ended up working for a non-profit teaching coding to urban youth. The irony is too real, but so have the lessons I’ve been learning along the way. What follows is my journey and series of lessons learned. In Hope Tech we have what we call an Innovation Challenge in which our students compete to create a game that can be played on a mobile device. Being challenged to invent something can seem like a daunting task, but Hope Tech desires to teach our students that this is an achievement well within their grasp. One of the first things we teach our students in the Innovation Challenge is the Development Cycle, a formula to guide the students in their innovative process. This formula breaks down the innovation process to 3 basic steps: Dream, Develop, Deploy. The first step in the Development Cycle is to Dream. Dreaming often begins by