TechSmartKids brings computer science to middle school students

Published 11:55 am Tuesday, October 21, 2014

If you ask software engineer Bruce Levin to describe his after-school computer science program, he can sum it up in two words.

“We call it ‘hard fun’,” said Levin, the founder and CEO of Bellevue-based technology company TechSmartKids, which is geared toward elementary and middle school youth. While courses are intensive and the coding can be hard, TechSmartKids offers students a new medium to create. “We see computer science as a way for kids to express themselves, just like art and music and other areas. There’s as much creativity in writing code as there is in writing a song.”

Beginning Oct. 27, TechSmartKids will bring its coding courses to Islander Middle School, with 90 minute after-school courses taking place over ten weeks for 6th-8th grade students. They will learn to code in Python, a professional object-oriented programming language.

Levin brought TechSmartKids to Mercer Island last year, with the course then geared solely toward elementary students and operating out of Mercer Island Community Center. He said that now, the time is ripe to expand to IMS.

“I think even more than high school, this is the first age level where they’re extremely capable to do advanced things, like Python for instance, and they still have an open mindset that they haven’t categorized themselves to one particular thing or two particular things,” Levin echoed.

In its first year, the school district collaborated with TechSmartKids, busing some 145 students to MICEC after school. Levin also found a partner in David D’Souza, a member of the Mercer Island Schools Foundation who worked at Microsoft for 20 years. A father of three with a son and a daughter currently in middle school, D’Souza knows firsthand the benefits of learning computer science at an early age.

“There are a fixed number of NBA players or football players, but there’s an unlimited demand for software engineers, and by far these are literally among the highest paid jobs in the world,” said D’Souza. “The kids who start earlier and younger, this is one of those skills like sports where you need the 10,000 hours of practice before you’re really great at it. The younger you start and the more your mindset is developed toward that, the better your skills. That’s what the TechSmart classes are enabling kids to do.”

D’Souza said in his eyes, everything is being turned upside down by software, be it with newspapers or hailing a taxi or getting a hotel room. People who aren’t proficient with the technology face the danger of being left behind. In an industry where software is constantly changing every few years, he noted the importance of having a computer science program available.

“That rapid pace is very different than what our school systems are able to deal with, and that pace isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s getting faster,” D’Souza said. “There’s something special that’s really needed to keep kids current and keep them adaptable and then for our teachers and our curriculum to be similarly adaptable.”

With the program supported by registration fees, TechSmartKids doesn’t cost the district any money. The program provides its own course instructors and curriculum, while making something as complex as coding age-appropriate when teaching to its pupils.

“We’re like the delivery arm to do this,” Levin said. “We’re not creating this movement; it’s happening. There’s more demand and higher paying jobs in this field, and I feel really fortunate to [have] a company that’s focused on this where schools and school districts are finding it so important and looking at ways to do this. That’s where we come in: we’re a mechanism to offer this to the community.”

Levin said the ultimate goal is to try to integrate it into the school day, as he believes computer science is a topic that is important enough to be in the school day and has the depth to be an everyday class. If it’s in the school day, it’s accessible to everybody and doesn’t have to contend with after-school sports and clubs. With his daughter in 7th grade, D’Souza mentioned the importance of bringing computer science to middle school girls. Gender inequality is a big issue in a tech industry that is less than 20 percent female. IMS principal Aaron Miller also noted the gender factor, saying the opportunity to have a program for both to be involved was something the school has been intrigued about for awhile.

If MISD is ever able to offer computer science as a piece of the core curriculum, Levin said it would be in the one-half of the one percentile of schools doing such. “It would be very innovative to offer something like that on a broad scale,” he said.

“I think there is something very special in the works here. What we’re doing and transitioning to do, you will not find going on anywhere else,” Levin said. “There is something really unique that could happen here. Hopefully, we’ll realize that vision.”

To learn more about the class or enroll online, visit the TechSmartKids website at www.techsmartkids.com/CodingCourses/c301?loc=mii.