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We are so proud of our girls from Newburgh Girls Code Club for presenting their projects and sharing their experience of growth in our supportive environment! Technology, empowernemnt, and sisterhood-building activities were highlighted as the key instruments for leadership.

NGCC student Alyssa Stinson spoke about the Girls Who Code program and experience, addressing Coding skills & Computer Science principles learned: (variables, conditionals, loops and functions) She shared the real life examples of leadership & collaboration that happened when girls were working through difficult problems together. She highlighted how girls were exploring Creativity, and acknowledged that the NGCC program is not only a coding class, but also a purpose driven community, sisterhood, and a good place to find trusted friends and adults.

She believes NGCC encourages bravery, and she's right! It's okay to show your work and brag about it... even works in progress.

As girls wanted to share some examples of what they’re working on, these projects were showcased:

10 y.o. Kioni Mortimer shared her Cat Quiz in Scratch and Riddle Chatbot in Python. While Kioni was demoing the project, Alyssa was commenting on which computer science principles were used and showing where they are in the code.

15 y.o. Laila Best  addressed how being introduced to coding has opened her mind up to different job opportunities, and even having her own business. She presented her entrepreneurial project build as Learn With Laila Google website, with an embedded Python chat-bot! Laila’s Website (with Chatbot embedded): https://sites.google.com/view/learnwithlaila/home?authuser=0 

Then, attendees were excited to hear Alyssa’s story of how Kioni showed her how to debug her chatbot. 

Skyla’s mom came up at Graduation to share how she was waiting in line for professional services and decided to try their website, and came across a chatbot on the website… and then her daughter commented: We’re learning how to code those in NGCC, mom. That was an A-Ha moment when Skyla's mom realized that her daughter is learning highly current and employable skills!

All girls received the certificate of excellence signed by Newburgh School District.

If you'd like to share these exciting news - please go ahead and use the following hastags: #NGCC, #GirlsWhoCode, #HudsonValleyCanCode

 

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Technology is one of the fastest growing industries today and one of the things we need most of in it is women. At NGCC we want to bring women into tech and bring tech to Hudson Valley so we are starting with the young girls of Newburgh! 

This is our third year running the Newburgh Girls Code Club and we are excited to say that yet another group of promising young women has graduated from our Spring semester (with the next group entering the Summer Intensive semester)!

Openhub strives to find ways to uplift the local community through tech education and we are so glad that we could bring that, and more, to these girls. They learned to empower themselves, and in the true spirit of leadership, uplift others too. Every girl, from our bubbliest to our quietest, learned to find her voice and developed her leadership skills, all while learning valuable coding skills that will provide a successful future in technology. 

While learning to code Python chatbots and websites, the girls also grew their confidence, practiced their resilience to keep learning through challenges, and overcame fears of failure in the spirit of trying new things in new ways. Mistakes were encouraged because they are the #1 way to learn and find creative solutions to problems, and at our graduation ceremony we could clearly see how much it paid off!

All of our girls presented their projects on stage to show off their fantastic work. From fully functioning websites to chatbots to websites with chatbots, each girl created something that displayed her newfound coding skills, and most importantly, her passions. We set challenges to include variables, conditionals, loops, and custom functions, which our girls took to with vigor and went above and beyond to include in their projects. They all had at least one of these skills in their projects and some even challenged themselves further to include them all!

We take pride in our progress over perfection, fun-filled approach to learning and are thrilled that it provided a safe and enriching environment for these girls to take their first (or second or third etc) steps into the amazing world of tech! Congratulations to every single girl who joined us in the Newburgh Girls Code Club, and thank you to all of the mentors who came to provide them with the valuable knowledge and life skills that they gained. 

Girls, we know you will go far and we hope to see you again soon in one of our upcoming programs. Own your skills and know that you always have the power to be whatever you want to!

            Learn more about NGCC here, and keep up with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the Newburgh Free Library website!