PROJECT TITLE
Nerd U: For Those with a Hunger to Learn and Thrive in the 21st Century
PROJECT GOAL: We focused on UN Global Goal 4, Quality Education, specifically target 4.4, “substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship,” because education in our community is substandard and outdated. These inequities in our majority BIPOC school district lead to poor outcomes. We are addressing these problems by increasing participation in Computer Science education, which includes 21st century skills and a higher rate of AP and early college classes. Our project is having a direct impact on economic, social, and political goals for our community.
We designed a site that would cater to our three user groups and their needs. Our plan included a Connectivity Hub page, designed to show students and families what kinds of wifi devices are available, where they can be acquired, how they can qualify, and answers to FAQs such as technical specifications. We also designed a Teachers’ Desk page, which would provide detailed information about available CS curricula, a schedule of trainings available in the area with information about fees and stipends, and a repository of information about job openings for CS teachers. Finally, we designed our CS(Revolution)aries page. This was designed to equip student-leaders to increase participation in CS at their schools. The forum would allow leaders to share tips with each other on destroying what we came to call The Nerd Stigma, because we were asking a hard question; how do we make this cool? “Cool” doesn’t have a textbook definition, “cool” has a crowdsourced definition, so we had to crowdsource the solution. The forum would also become a place where students could share resources for extending learning and a place where we could cultivate new generations of student leaders. Yes, we will train our replacements.
