Mission Bit, a San Francisco based non-profit organization held student showcase on December 8th, 2018 at the Pier 70 Gusto/Uber office. Mission Bit runs after-school programs to help underserved students learn computer science and coding. The program started in 2012 with just 1 school and now grew to cover 12 schools in the San Francisco and Oakland area having served over 2,800 students.
The students go through a semester long program (about 50 hrs), which are led by industry experts who are also Mission Bit alumni. The students learn the basics of programming and begin building their own projects. At the end of the semester, the students showcase their remarkable work to family, friends and industry professionals who give feedback and award best projects.
In just a semester, students who came in with no experience in coding created their own games, websites and interactive projects. Looking at the final products, one can only imagine the countless hours the students must have spent debugging and troubleshooting.
The first place winner is a group of students who created a game called “Miner Mike”. The group overcame many struggles except for one. There was a bug they were not able to get rid of. Instead of giving up, they’ve tweaked the bug into a unique feature in the game. The brilliant idea and perseverance put them in first place.
Roshan, another Mission Bit showcase winner, created a comic fan site from scratch. Roshan had no web development skills when he joined Mission Bit and now showcased a website that paid meticulous attention to user experience. Roshan mentioned that he wants to further develop the project so it can incorporate more interactive features. Roshan isn’t the only student who wants to continue improving his or her project.
Popfizz Computer Science, an online course provider and an advocate of Mission Bit, gave all Mission Bit students free access to the Advanced Placement Computer Science courses. This way, they can continue building their skills and explore deeper into computer science.
Stevon Cook, CEO of Mission Bit, closed the showcase with remarks urging the audience to engage and invest in expanding opportunities for providing CS education to underserved students, so they can gain the skills and knowledge needed to excel as the future workforce.
To learn more about Mission Bit visit https://www.missionbit.com
About Mission Bit:
Mission Bit strives to eliminate the tech divide for youth living in urban poverty and rural areas across the San Francisco Bay Area by building computer programming and professional opportunity pathways for public school students. We provide everything the students need, they just need to show up and be eager to learn. No prior experience required.
We give students the opportunity to learn directly from successful engineers and entrepreneurs who enjoy sharing knowledge. We’re focused on project based learning and aim to teach both core computer science concepts as well as the practical skills and technologies that are required to build web sites and applications today.
