Dev Catalyst Students Are San Francisco Bound!
Dev Catalyst is rooted in developing student coders who are marketable in today’s workforce and we offer three high school competition categories: Hardware Development, Novice Web Development, and Data Development. Over two hundred students submitted competition entries this year alone. Eighty students were named code leaders and invited to celebrate at Awardaganza hosted at theCO.
Dev Catalyst Students at theCOtoberfest
theCO held its fourth annual theCOtoberfest at the end of October. The event featured a Fortune 500 Teller Booth, Maker Demos, CO:bots students, and the CO.STARTERS Showcase. But the booth that seemed to have the most traffic was the Raspberry Pi(e) Booth set up by Dev Catalyst. Throughout the day, kids of all ages entertained themselves by practicing their coding skills and interacting with Raspberry Pis.
Dev Catalyst Teachers On Improved Classrooms
theCO’s program, Dev Catalyst, annually hosts a competition for local students who are interested in coding and robotics. Throughout the course of the program, nearly 800 students participated in one of three categories (Novice Web Development, Advanced Web Development, and Data Development) in order to learn teamwork skills, develop professional skills, network with tech professionals, and hopefully win the grand prize trip to San Francisco, California.
Dev Catalyst Becomes CSforAll Member
“Support local change,” “increase rigor and equity,” and “grow the movement.” These are three things that one would see when first opening the CSforAll webpage. The CSforAll Consortium is a effort started by the National Science Foundation to make computer science accessible for all students nationwide. Recently, the organization has added Dev Catalyst, a program of theCO, as a new consortium member alongside big tech companies like Google, Dell, Facebook, and Teach For America.
Dev Catalyst Celebrates Its Fifth Annual San Francisco Trip
During the start of the 2017-2018 school year, high school students began applying to theCO’s Dev Catalyst program, a curriculum designed to cultivate and grow the abilities of students with technological talents in the greater West Tennessee area. Throughout the course of the program, nearly 800 students participated in one of three categories (Novice Web Development, Advanced Web Development, and Data Development) in order to learn teamwork skills, develop professional skills, network with tech professionals, and hopefully win the grand prize trip to San Francisco, California.
Coding Skills Give Students Endless Job Opportunities
Dev Catalyst is committed to preparing high school students for profitable careers in technology-based fields, such as advanced manufacturing.
According to the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, over the last five years, Tennessee has ranked in the Top 10 for the largest percentage increase in the United States in manufacturing GDP, which reached $49.1 billion in 2016, making it 17% of the state’s total GDP. Advanced manufacturing job creation in Tennessee, in particular, far outpaces the rate of national growth.
Technology has revolutionized the manufacturing industry. The incorporation of robots on the assembly line has led to quicker, more efficient production. Companies have also streamlined the manufacturing and production process by using computer-aided design software.
Dev Catalyst: Raspberry Pi Workshops
At the beginning of the school year, Molly Plyler’s five- and seven-year-old daughters were asking for a new computer. So she gave them a Raspberry Pi, keyboard, and monitor and told them that if they could figure out how to put it together, it would be their school computer. In less than fifteen minutes, the seven-year-old had her computer running.
“It’s kind of a skill that’s lost,” said Plyler, who runs Dev Catalyst, theCO’s student program that aims to improve technology education. “If you go back to the 80s, when you were working with a computer, there was some command-line code that you were kind of used to because that’s how the computer worked, and now we give kids an iPad, and there’s very little understanding of how it works or what it looks like on the inside.”
Raspberry Pis are mini-computers that are relatively inexpensive, costing about $35. Dev Catalyst is currently offering workshops for middle and high school students that teach how to use a Raspberry Pi.
Programming Languages Meet the Written Language
This summer, four Dev Catalyst students took on Jackson-Madison County Library’s Big Read website. Students from schools across West Tennessee were hand-selected to develop the official website for the project, an effort to get the nation reading.