Blog

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!