Twelve students in grades eight through 11 presented websites they created, Aug. 3, as part of a free, eight-week long coding workshop at Northern New Mexico College.
The students each built a website from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which instructors Kyle Hagler, 31, of Albuquerque, and Dana Yazzie, 23, of Gallup, taught them over the eight-week course.
The students’ websites spanned a variety of topics including Pokémon, heavy metal, video games and communism.
In addition to creating their own websites, the students created two community project websites.
Judith Perez, 16, and Rique Fernandez, 17, the only female students in the workshop, created a website for Española Valley High School to highlight the clubs and sports at the high school.
The website had a talent section featuring work from students in the art classes as well as a photo of the athlete of the week.
Fernandez said they decided to create it because they wanted a website that highlights the work of students rather than the administration.
She said learning HTML was the hardest part of the course and she was glad she got to meet people that she wouldn’t normally talk to at her high school through the course.
The other group of students created a gaming forum for Española with reviews of video games.
Hagler said the website would most likely serve the students and their friends, but it was nice to see the enthusiasm they had when creating the website.
Hagler is a freelance web developer and computer science graduate from the University of Florida. He said this was his first time teaching high school students and he was surprised by the students’ enthusiasm for learning.
Yazzie participated in the first Cultivating Coders class in Farmington last year and has taught six classes since then.
“I have come a long way because I never knew anything about coding (before the class),” she said. “I have learned so much in a year.”
Cultivating Coders ran two other classes during the same time frame, June 12 to Aug. 4, one on the Navajo Nation and one in the South Valley.
After the presentations Clifford Rees, who works for Rep. Ben Ray Lujan D-Rio Arriba, Los Alamos, Sandoval and Santa Fe counties, urged students in the course to participate in the 2017 Congressional App Challenge.
The challenge is open to middle school and high school students and an individual or team must create a mobile or web app for the chance to present their app in front of the House of Representatives.
Northern New Mexico College engineering professor Steve Cox said the Nov. 1 deadline is right around the corner and he would be happy to work with students to complete a project in time.
Charles Ashley III, founder of Cultivating Coders, said the students breezed through the lessons that some adults struggle through.
Before the presentations, Northern President Richard Bailey talked about the difference between digital immigrants and digital natives, people who have grown up with technology versus people who have had to adapt to technology.
“I have a Ph.D and my 10-year-old godson programmed my iPad,” he said.
Cultivating Coders is part of the national Techhire initiative, a program started under the Obama administration, to fill over 500,000 open tech jobs in America.
Ashley said the workshops were created specifically for areas like Española. The company partnered with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Española School District to bring the class to Española.
Each student got to keep the laptop they were using during the program. Ashley said the laptops are a vehicle for success for the students in the course.
“I wanted to get these kids engaged in tech and hungry for more knowledge,” he said. “With the laptop they can do work and research without relying on the library all the time for Internet.”