Coder Blog

What an amazing day! Our guest speaker, Monique Denton-Davis, founder of “Embrace Your Cake”, taught the STEM Queens self-love and appreciation. Her secret recipe to success consists of “C.A.K.E”, an acronym which stands for: C – Confidence in yourself, A- Having a positive attitude, K – Kindness towards everyone, and E – Reaching for excellence. After having a heart-to-heart with the girls, they spent the rest of the time creating vision boards. Taking cutouts from Read more…

Hello parents and students! Today, the STEM Queens of XX Coders continued their quest to learn coding through a variety of platforms: CodeCombat, Codecademy, CodingBat and more! Many of them succeeded in completing CodeCombat’s challenges and moved onto Codecademy, where they further enriched their knowledge of the language Python. Many of them will soon be able to accomplish our daily Coding Challenges which have proven to be quite difficult, but a few girls are already Read more…

Wow! We cannot believe we are already three days into our camp. Our girls continue to surprise us with their knowledge and adaptability to the lessons we explore together. Today, students spent the majority of the day playing around with a website known as Code Combat, a browser-based video game where they assumed the role of a knight and solved their way through the dungeons by figuring out puzzles. The puzzles began with more ‘pyhton style’ coding Read more…

Hello parents and students! The STEM queens continued their scratch projects with help from camp mentors. They spent the day making unique and creative projects, ranging from ping-pong games, to narrations about birthday parties, dance battles, and racing adventures. The room is quiet, filled with intense focus, interrupted by occasional giggles as they show their project to their friends for feedback. Some of them wrap up one project and excitedly continue to the next, while Read more…

Welcome back! Today our STEM queens began their two week coding journey with us. The girls started by introducing themselves and getting to know one another. This was done through interactive games such as ‘Two Truths and a Lie’. Afterwards, we logged into our Google Classroom accounts and had the girls familiarize themselves with last year’s material. Since many of our students came from different skills levels, returning students were encouraged to continue where they Read more…

June 7th marked the last day of our program before summer break. We are so proud to see how far our XX Coders have come along. In the past year, they have learned several programming languages and designed their own personal websites. With some of the students leaving for college in the fall, we hope that their coding classes will be a breeze. In celebration of completing the program, we invited Renee Flager, President of Read more…

We had an amazing time with our guest, Diane Chao, TEDxTeen speaker and founder of a “Letters to Strangers”. In the midst of final exams and company meetings, Diane made the trek from Princeton, NJ to spend time with our students and connect with them on a personal level. Although she has faced many hardships growing up, she turned her life around by adapting a growth-mindset from an early age. Now she is an advocate Read more…

We were honored to have Jeanine Reynolds, Director of Development at the Wyandanch Youth Center, give a talk to the girls during one of our after-school session during Black History Month. Mrs. Reynolds spoke about the beginning of her journey from North Carolina Central University, and the importance of having a core group of women who empower each other during her college career. Currently, she is dedicated to providing equal opportunity to all individuals, regardless Read more…

This past month has been quite eventful for our after-school program. For Valentine’s Day, we held party for the girls, which had a great turnout. Also, in celebration of Black History Month, we had a special guest, Alexa Cox, join us. Alexa is currently Miss Long Island Teen 2018! She immediately connected with the girls upon arrival. Together, they worked on designing their own t-shirts with the theme being female empowerment. It was a great Read more…

At the end of last month, we participated in a code-a-thon hosted by We Connect the Dots. We have been looking forward to this event for a few months now, and the day finally came! Overall, the experience was great. It was a 3-day overnight event, and the girls got a chance to meet new people from different schools who they worked with in a group setting. The challenge was to create a solution for Read more…