Dear PCCS Community,

We are excited to announce that through the efforts of Dan Fedor (Board Member and father of two charter school students), PCCS has been approved to start a chapter of Girls Who Code!  

Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire, educate, and equip girls from 6th – 12th grades with the computing skills to pursue 21st century opportunities.  In short, the program aims to teach computer coding to young women to provide parity in the rapidly growing field of computer programming. 

Now that we have been approved to start a chapter, PCCS has offered space to implement an Afterschool Club and to do so we need we to recruit volunteer instructors.  The program calls for the club to meet once a week for the duration of the school year and the classes are two hours long.  The Club’s goal is to recruit more than one volunteer instructor so we can mitigate people’s time commitment.

If you, or someone you know, may be interested in teaching, here is an idea of what Dan seeks:

•  Instructors can range from industry professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and computer science enthusiasts who are committed to achieving parity in the tech workforce.
•  Instructors must have experience in computer science to qualify however.  Here is a link to the website that goes into more detail about all aspects of the organization.
•  We also seek volunteers to assist with classroom management (no computing experience required).

We plan to have an initial club of 24-28 students and this will be open to both PCCS and non-PCCS students.  Class meeting times and dates are yet to be determined, but we are hoping to begin prior to the end of October 2015. The final details will be posted on the schools website once we have finalized the instructor(s) recruitment and their schedules.

If you are interested in having your daughter join, or are interested in volunteering, please email Dan Fedor.

“What if my son or daughter (who is not yet in 6th grade) also wants to learn computer coding?”

We realize this may inspire parents of our younger students of both genders to want them to learn to code as well. Stay tuned, Dan is also working on an initiative to bring a separate club to the school that would teach students of both genders ages 7-14 how to build and program computers.  The program we are researching involves the Kano Computer.

In summary, please share this with your social and professional networks to help us find instructors for this wonderful initiative.

Sincerely,

Dan Fedor 
(312) 476-9196