It has been seven years since We Connect The Dots was established, and five years since Nebula professional Development Academy was established, it has been an incredible journey. We have overcome enormous challenges along the way, each time learning, and building a stronger social enterprise more resilient than ever.
We are a social venture creating positive systemic change to today’s education system from K-to-Career. We provide underrepresented populations with access to immersive learning experiences to teach information technology and computer science education.
We teach students ages 7-18 years old the power of creativity through coding, we then take those experiences with students and design curriculum for the classroom to engage diverse learning needs. We empower educators with the tools and resources to reignite learning through the integration of technology and blended learning experiences across knowledge domains, and we bridge education and industry to support adults entering, reentering, and rebuilding their careers. We call this the Computer Science Growth System, a model that builds capacity in our students, our educators, and our workforce. This model changes the dynamics of how and what we teach to reduce the gap between academia and industry needs.
Our workforce is evolving, and with it the skills necessary to sustain in our future. This shift demands new thinking about how and what we are teaching our students in the classroom, and how we maintain and retool our competitive skills in the workforce.
With the help of partnerships like Marcum LLP our team has redefined our messaging and how we view our social enterprise with the work that We Connect The Dots and Nebula Academy accomplish together. This report crosses over the highlights of our work together in 2019 and our goals for 2020.
As a research focused education organization, we are continuously evaluating how and what we teach in our student programs, our educator programs, and in our workforce development programs. When we design a new program or modify an existing program our approach to the design is consistent from an operations and scale model. We first evaluate the need. What are the skills that we need to teach? We utilize assessments to gain a baseline and then measure outcomes through post assessments, and internal program evaluations. Using cognitive neuroscience research as a part of our methodology we create learning experiences that involve gamification, foundational skills, and a framework of the learning outcomes we seek to create as a result of the program.
We blend it all together to create a story board of how the timeline flows, where we need to chunk out the content to maintain engagement, determine the emotions we need to spark to create the neurochemicals and the recipe for stickiness, than experiment to see what the outcomes result in. Sometimes it goes exactly as planned the first time through the activity, sometimes we scratch it and start over. Most cases we nail it as a result of our design methodology, but almost 100% of the time we are tweaking to increase the learning outcomes for every participant.
2020 Annual CODE-A-Thon:
This program continues to evolve each year with a goal to engage more students in learning about the career opportunities in the world of web development. It is not about every student coming away with the ability to code, it is about creating impact in rural and underrepresented communities. The impact targets students, educators, and businesses in the local area where the program is held. This community program brings together a collaborative effort to build capacity and engage students in a positive learning experience. Each student will take away a different sense of accomplishment. Some will have had the opportunity to work collaboratively on a project for the first time.
Many will gain a sense of belonging to something that makes them feel like they can make a positive contribution and build their self-worth and self-esteem. Students will learn a bit about themselves and how well they work with others, all preparing them to gain self-awareness of what they might do differently to improve their experience, and their ability to contribute to a successful project. We just wrapped up our fifth year of the program, check out our highlight video showcasing the value to students and the communities who host the program. You can also visit our FaceBook page to watch the student projects that were broadcast live via Facebook during the final day of the program. We have also included some demographics from this year’s program, and links to recordings of a few of the student team projects.
CODE-A-Thon Program Highlight Video Link
Student projects Video link
We are already planning the 2021 program and seeking partners to help invest in funding to train host site leads so that we can expand our reach for 2021 into new states including SC, NJ, CA. Funds will support transportation to and from the program for students in rural areas of OH, and address transportation challenges on Long Island, NY.
2019 Discovery Day at Microsoft:
Each year we utilize our Discovery Day at Microsoft program to evaluate new curriculum and new technology to see if it resonates with students, and how it might be integrated into a classroom learning experience or blended into a knowledge domain. We have been teaching coding in partnership with STEAM Drones for the past year, impacting hundreds of schools, teachers and students nationally. Teaching teachers and nonprofit STEM instructors how to integrate coding with physical computing into the classroom and within STEM education programs.
Using novel tools like drones to teach coding is super cool for both students and educators. What about using those same tools to teach complex math to get students to see that aha moment or insight into real world applied mathematics? This is where things get fun and create transformation in the classroom. We decided to shape content that helped teachers and students make connections in complex math and how students might reverse engineer concepts to see how math is utilized in creating autonomous missions for drones. The concept was a big hit with both students and educators, the result shaped curriculum for a ½ year elective for middle school students using drones to code and learn math in new ways.
Based on the success of the workshops we integrated drones into the Hack-A-Thon this year and piloted a coding competition using the drones. This concept is now being developed for a broader national competition concept. We are doing a number of small pilot programs running this spring at universities on Long Island, teaching underrepresented populations including girls, to code with drones. We are seeking industry partners for sponsorship of the program at a national and local level.
You can see an example of a typical workshop Nebula Academy delivers in partnership with STEAM Drones and DroneBlocks, in this video from Computer Science week this past December at Chapin School in New York City.
BuildingSTEAM Benefit:
In May of 2019 we moved into our new home in a facility in Syosset NY. This new space provides us with a place where we can host programs, better utilize our equipment, and provide our team with the space and resources to develop new programs. We are now able to offer regular consistent learning programs to teach coding, and deliver in person and virtual professional development programs. Moving was the right thing for us, but it presented new challenges in getting the students and community members who need our programs the most with access to our programs. Transportation on Long Island is the biggest inhibitor to educating underrepresented populations. As we engage with seeking grants to support creating impact we have placed a high priority on incorporating transportation costs into our budgets in 2020 and beyond.
Software Engineer Bootcamp: (Nebula Academy Program – Scholarship Program “Pathways to Success” Management by WCTD)
In July of 2019 we invested in an application for the NYS Consolidated Funding Application for Workforce Development Funds. The project “Pathways To Success” a 22 week Software Engineer program was the first grant application that blended the strengths of the two organizations. Nebula Academy delivering the education program and WCTD supporting the program management, and scholarships for participants from underrepresented populations, including women, veterans, disabled, and those without financial means. As we designed this program and the scholarships we wanted to ensure the program outcomes took candidates to entry level roles in information technology careers. The design incorporates technical skills, along with soft skills, and an industry certification. In order to ensure candidates could make the investment in the program we incorporated transportation costs, a small stipend for living costs while in training, food and snacks during the program, all the resource expenses including certification exams, and a laptop to support the necessary tool box of a web developer.
We are in the final phases of our application process for our March 2020 cohort to begin with over 50 applications for scholarships, we will not be able to provide every candidate the opportunity to participate, however we are looking at other funding sources including providing options to pay after employment for participants not selected for scholarships.
AWS Academy:
In the spring of 2019 we engaged with Amazon to become a AWS Academy, offering accredited AWS courses as a part of our programs. This was a major investment in building staff capacity and a marketing and sales process to drive demand. Almost a year later our instructors our accredited and we have integrated the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification into our SE Bootcamp program. This spring we will begin delivering both in person and live remote sessions. We have a number of colleges and universities working with us to offer AWS programs in blended or stacked courses to enable students to gain not only a degree, but an industry certification as well.
Real-world Experience:
Sometimes experiments lead you to new opportunities and unexpected results, results that turn out to be way more amazing than you had planned. After 7 years and numerous requests by our Community Ambassador students we took on a project to redesign our website, and implement Salesforce to track our program registrations and funding sources. With a goal to better manage program engagements for those participating in our programs, and who is supporting us through donations, as well as manage our grant processes more efficiently. This would lay the ground work to enable scale operationally with limited resources. A new look for the public and new backend data would require resources and funding to support the efforts. With neither available we thought through a concept idea using Volunteer Match, the platform we leverage to seek volunteers for our programs. With our upcoming SE Bootcamp we needed to be able to design a model where our participants could work on projects for nonprofits and small startups to help the organizations and help the participants build real-world project experience and portfolios to gain employment.
"Volunteering for WCTD helped me in numerous ways. My recruiter and hiring manager were impressed that after learning I kept myself engaged by implementing my knowledge in real time projects through volunteering at WCTD. Personally, I felt it gave me enough confidence to face the interviews and gave me a sense of accomplishment, resulting in obtaining a job. Thank you WCTD for giving me the opportunity to demonstrate my skills while giving back." - Swati - Software Engineer
With a team of volunteers, we shaped the roles we would need as well as a brief description of the skills required to participate. Next we created the volunteer posts on Volunteer Match and socialized them through our social media outlets. Within an hour of posting the opportunity we begin to get requests to participate. Some people wanted to help because they had years of experience and were seeking an opportunity to give back, but the majority of volunteers wanted the opportunity to build their capacity to gain employment. This was the insight that we had already known was an issue, but for the first time it was being shared in these requests in a way we had never imagined.
The projects have been ongoing for the past few months and the concept has more than proven its success in supporting those in need of real-world application of their skills, and providing an opportunity to create teaching moments on a project that can support people to gain employment. This experiment will now evolve into our Bootcamp as we engage with nonprofit organizations and small startups to help create a win, win, win scenario for our students, companies, and our organization.
After school Coding Program:
Our enrollment for our afterschool coding program is beginning to build momentum, which is exciting as it builds funding sources to support our facility costs. Our challenge is ensuring we have a diverse population of students participating in the program. To be successful in offering scholarships for the coding programs we need to increase our paid student ratio to support our ability to offer scholarships, but it is not the complete solution. We tried to offer scholarships to students in underrepresented communities on Long Island in our fall 2019 session, however they could not get to our facility to participate. Transportation is a big challenge; students want to participate but getting to us is a huge hurdle. Our goal for 2020 is to find creative partnerships that will either fund the costs or provide the transportation services as a donation or at a reduced cost. Transportation is an inhibitor for students seeking the opportunity to be a part of our learning programs. 2020 will be the year to address this issue and to remove the barrier and enable us to create a broader impact.
Building Computer Science Capacity in Schools:
2019 was an incredible year of growth and rebuilding, but in order to create real positive systemic change we need to address the real challenge our education system is facing. We are currently experiencing over 300,000 job shortfall in public education. The costs of a significant teacher employment gap are high, and consequences measurable, including changes to curricula and our ability to teach computer science in schools. The rate of growth in industries requiring higher level thinking skills is outpacing our ability to fill the demand. Traditional learning programs have not evolved to support the diverse learning needs of today's society. With over 26,000 high schools in the US, less than 50 % teach computer science. We plan to create a big dent in that number, starting this summer with our Computer Science Teacher Certification Bootcamp. This professional development program aligns with the NYS Computer Science Certificate Coursework Guidance, and as a NYS CTLE provide Nebula Academy will be providing a certification for educators who complete the full four week program.
This four week program is designed to support schools in building the necessary capacity to provide Computer Science education in the classroom. Registration for this program is opening in February of 2020, with the feedback we have received from our education community we already know this program will fill to capacity quickly. Applications for scholarships will be available shortly after registration opens. Scholarships will be targeted at Title One school districts on Long Island.
Coaching and Team Building Programs:
As a research organization we utilize the latest cognitive neuroscience research from organizations like The Academy of Brain-Based Leadership (ABL), and the Neuroleadership Institute. We blend our coaching training into our programs and ensure our instructors are trained in our teaching model to bring the best outcomes to our train the trainer programs and our professional development programs. We work with corporations to create custom designed workforce development programs that help re-skill through gamified team building workshops that reinforce company values, skills, and team collaboration goals. Through a NYC professional development contract awarded in 2019 we plan to provide more of these immersive training programs to impact company’s by increasing productivity through greater accountability and coaching cultures in the workforce.
We currently have a one room schoolhouse which limits us to delivering only one program at a time. We have creatively designed our programs to support day classes, after school programs, and evening learning and events. Our goal is to seek funding sources either through grants or angel investors who value the impact we are creating as a social enterprise. Through these funding sources we will build staffing capacity to deliver more programs, increase marketing and sales capacity to drive our brand and program awareness, and expand into larger space to deliver a greater impact to the audiences who need us most.
Thank you to all of our volunteers and partners for supporting our success in 2019!
