Digital Brilliance Hour

In the technical STEM world, the percentages of underprivileged communities, namely african american, are extremely low comparatively. The conversations of equity and diversity in the field are at an all time high, but the targeted communities aren't properly prepared to respond to this need. This is where we come in. We focus on teaching and building upon engineering fundamentals coupled with real world experience to our community, ages 12-19, that lead to more of us having those transferable skills to be better prepared after high school. The students learn and gain transferable experience in software development through game development. 

We all know that equity, racism, and diversity is a problem in the US and all over the world. Especially in the STEM and technical field. When you look at the percentages out there, people of color(black and latino) are severely under-represented in this space. Well below even women. So there's a huge initiative to fix this problem. But one of the biggest problems is finding people in that demographic that are prepared to respond to this initiative. The higher percentage demographics are able to take advantage of these opportunities because of their access to the information, so that they can be prepared to do so. Not so for black and latino. We aren't as prepared in this space as we should be due to many different reasons, access being one of them.

Digital Brilliance Hour uses virtual and in-person means to take someone with completely no experience in the STEM field and build up their fundamentals and skills in software development and STEM, as well as exposing them to real world experience by working as a company to build their own portfolio. They will have access to the many tools that the larger tech companies out there use to get ahead. They are also taught Agile Methodologies, while using those methodologies and Design Thinking standards. Completion of the program will leave a student with at least 3 years of real world experience before they even graduate high school. These are transferable computer, software development, and STEM skills that can utilized in so many different ways, including college credits. We use a combination of Zoom, Mighty Networks, Git, Jira, Miro, Bandlab, and the OpenBOR Game Engine to properly train our students to succeed. We always have a 100% success rate, where students have used this knowledge to go even farther than they realized since their confidence was given a huge boost of seeing something through to the end. 

Digital Brilliance Hour serves under-privileged communities. Namely, Black and Latino. Black and Latino are severely under-served in the STEM/Tech community because of access, opportunities, and learned fundamentals. I understand from personal experience. Only by situations that I was guided to and my stubborn personality to succeed, I was able to push through these limitations. But everyone doesn't have that drive, confidence, or access. Even in a world where tech is all over the place. I had mentors to push me, and I wanted to be the change that I wanted to see. So, I became what I had in my life. I come from where these students are and understand things that sometimes parents don't understand, like anime and video games. I, as well as my other teachers, use this love of ours to connect to the students while showing them that software development and STEM isn't as difficult as it may seem on the surface. When you understand the fundamentals, you can achieve anything you set your mind to. The students experience this themselves and you just see their confidence build every time. They start to tell us and teach us things from their vantage point. They start to feel like they can do anything and keep going. The students learn every faction of Game development(Executive Producter, Coding, Design, QA, Marketing, Audio Engineering). They even experience breaking up into those teams and being team leads to direct their teams. Once they've built their product, they hold an official release party and present on what they built and release. The skills and confidence lead to being able to take advantage of job opportunities, build businesses, and provide for yourself and your family. Having this access is so huge and cuts down on crime because if one has the skills to be able to provide for themselves there wouldn't be any need for crime. We've been doing this since 2017 and went virtual in 2020. Right now we can only support 10 students at a time, but we want to support more because our curriculum has been proven to work every time. We want to be able to support up to 50 or more students at a time. Or even spread the curriculum around and teach others how to run it so that people all over the world can learn from the ground up. Also, students who age out of the program are invited back through paid internships to be peer mentors, to eventually be a teacher or any other job role, if they so choose. We just wanted to create something that is a revolving door that keeps on giving, so that we can continue to chisel away at the larger problem. 

We definitely are a champion for ensuring under-represented communities are better prepared in tech and STEM. Because right now, even though equity and diversity talks are being had, we'd miss out only because we weren't ready to take advantage and everything will remain the same. We're already who we're targeting. We're who our target is trying to be. Which is why we do so well at our jobs. Now that we do this virtually and work with people all over the country, we certainly fit this challenge. DBH was made for this challenge.

We selected "Growth" because our curriculum and program has been proven for the past 2 years. We've been testing and tweaking our approach for 4 years, which each implementation being a success. But when COVID came, we had to adjust our approach to be able to deliver the same results virtually, and was successful in doing so. A high percentage of our class has either gone to college for tech or stayed in the same field in some way as we boosted their confidence and skill level in what they may already been interested in. We can only really support 10 students at a time and the demand for our curriculum is rising every day. We want to be able to support more youth, up to 50 per session. 

Our very existence is to better fight racism, especially in the technical world. There's not a place for everyone yet, and we're doing what we can to build a space for all, especially people of color(black and latino). The only way to fully fight racism or approach any problem is to 1) fix the root of the problem, and 2) fix the most glaring issue first, so the rest is easier to fix. We are focused on option #2. People of color are at the bottom of the list when it comes to technology, especially software development. Building up our communities to have skills in this field to be used anywhere is key. More skills in our communities, mean more access to resources, which mean access to wealth to grow the communities. Imagine if at least 25% of african americans were making $100K and above. More access to wealth lowers crime and builds confidence. Being skilled in a forever growing field where you're constantly needed is a huge confidence booster, which leads to less rash decisions. It's all about access. If our youth were inspired to be a lead in technology as much as sports, we'd definitely be in a different situation. 

DBH is innovative simply from the benefits it provides our youth. One big issue that the pandemic has taught us is that even though we have all of these tools that are made for virtual building, many institutions and people all over the world find it difficult to learn and function virtually. Our curriculum is set to keep everything engaging. Most of the students in our virtual class prefer to be in person, but are learning even more through our virtual approach. We have it structured in a way that everyone is able to ask a question, everyone is able to keep up with each other and hold each other accountable. Plus, we are the audience we're targeting. We pick up unspoken nuances that most bigger competition won't. We know how to speak directly to our audience, so it truly sinks in. Not an exercise that I want to do some community service for just to get hours for. But we truly prepare them to succeed in any aspect of life. We just use STEM to do that. 

We use a combination of many tools. Zoom, Mighty Networks, AWS, Github, Miro, Bandlab, Jira, Talking Pts, PlaceIt, Windows, and the OpenBOR Game Engine.

We use Mighty Networks as our base of operations as it serves as our community and course catalog. Our classes are run with Zoom and we rely on the Breakout Session function heavily to simulate the 1 on 1 experience during class. The OpenBOR Game Engine is a Windows application, so Windows computers are required for that. We use AWS's Virtual Machines for anyone who doesn't have access to a Windows computer. Miro is used for our design thinking brainstorming sessions, Github is used for the students to keep track of and store their code, and Jira is for project management. The music production class uses Bandlab, which is accessible on any device. We use PlaceIt to build team logos for the games we develop for and Talking Pts is a communication system that relies on text, as we realized that parent respond more to text than email. Especially in our communities. We keep them up to date with everything going on and keep them and students on task for class dates. 

This is our portfolio page. All products were created by students:

https://www.digitalbrilliancehour.com/product-portfolio.html

We took all of our products and combined them all on one page. The are albums and games are well liked by the public and we always receive great review for them. 

We also provide testimonials on our homepage of many of what our students say about their experiences. 

We've never had a bad review yet.

No risks from our point of view. Because youth are already in this tech world as it is. We just show them how this world works. They're on social media all the time. Now they know how it works to use it for their benefit, and also learn how to create videos. They see the social media world a lot differently after exposing them to the nuts and bolts. 

Currently we serve 15 students per session, we have 3 sessions a year, so that's typically 30 students a year as a lot of them repeat. We are aiming to expand to be able support 50 students per session at 100 a year within one year. In 5 years, we want to expand and train organizations across the world in the curriculum to be able to run it as a subsidiary. In 5 years we hope to be supporting at least 1250 youth a year, we want to see this number in the hundred thousands to millions in that 5 years to be completely honest, but we'll keep it at 25 kids per state for now. If we had the curriculum with all school systems in the US at 25 per district, that would go up to 337,650. 

In 1 year, our impact would spread the word of our curriculum and begin conversations with other organizations on how to properly teach our youth in STEM to where it sticks and becomes a way of life for them and their family. Spreading the knowledge that we're amassing to spread across the world. So more knowledge of the success of our students is going to be key. In one year we'll be taking on more youth, expanding our staff, and expanding our brand. This will continue to bring awareness of our curriculum and generate interest in how other areas can do what we're doing. We aren't trying to do everything ourselves. We want to spread what we've learned to enable other entities to continue the curriculum. So in 5 years, it will be a trend to properly learn STEM in our communities, and we look at STEM just like we would sports. When we see that it's possible to exist in the STEM world, the possibilities are endless. Just think about if 1 person of color from every state in the US(52 people) decided to get together and form a software tech company. Just think if that idea became viral and there are games and software being promoted that can actually change conditions in our communities. And we're able to see this change because it went viral. That's when it's truly going to click. We'll start believing we can do it, too. In 5 years we can be there. 

We use number of students who learn these skills, students who return, and students who succeed after high school with the skills they've learned as measurements of success. We keep relationships with our students after they graduate from the program, and all of them have a better handle on life. They have larger aspirations and plans to execute those because they've already done it before in our program. That's how we measure our success. 

Right now 2 full time, 2 part time contractors, and 2 interns(people who graduated program).  We get on average 2-3 additional mentors per session but they only last for that session. 

All of our team is a reflection of our target. So everyone on the team looks like our target. We understand our target, because we ARE our target. The full timers have over 15 years of experience in the subject their teaching. Game development and music production. We know what what our students will experience going into the tech world, and we can prepare them for that. We really are about preparing our youth to succeed. Everyone has a voice in this environment. It's not just about "teaching them some stuff". We are showing them how to succeed and being there every step of the way. Because we want to see them succeed. It brings us joy to see our students' confidence build and eyes light up. Seeing their knowledge increase is bliss for us. Because what we wanted for so long, being the only ones in our surroundings while always excelling in our work, and wanting to just have someone else in your surrounding you don't have to explain cultural nuances to, is one step closer when we see students growing in knowledge and confidence.  

The part timers and interns have all graduated from the curriculum and been taught how to  lead from the background. 

Our biggest contributor to our success is our teachers being and looking like our students. That allows the students to open up in a way that they aren't always able to do. No matter how patient other demographics are with them. I hear this all the time from students. So as far as building a diverse team, our definition of diverse is including all forms of genders, but within people of color. We do this by forming relationships with other orgs, from interviews and our work relationships with people who are sprinkled about. Networking definitely has been a huge help so far. 

We are applying for this challenge to make our 5 year plan happen a lot faster, within a year. I personally feel like our program was made for this challenge. Everything this challenge is about, we tackle. This challenge will help us expand our staff and awareness to be able to offer more workshops, have a 1500% jump in growth, and form partnerships all over the country and world to spread the knowledge of tech and STEM. We aim a conduit, if anything else to forming a worldwide bridge in supporting changing the lives of our communities. There are so many other organizations out there who want to do what we do, and access to our curriculum would help make that happen. Being able to spread the word and have enough staff to spread the knowledge around to form even more alliances is what this challenge will be used for. 

We've been running our program with the partners we mentioned earlier since 2017. The virtual aspect of it started in 2020. Because we've been able to figure out a successful approach to virtual learning with our youth what led us to this challenge. 

Our program starts with the training portion, so we have courses(based on what level you've graduated to: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert) that we take the students through together. The students have access to the teachers in real time, where we work together to complete all the exercises. These exercises are hands on activities that also assist the students in building their own personal demo. The second half of the workshop is the internship/implementation piece, the students take what they learned in their courses and apply them in real experience working on public products. They either create a new product or work on existing products. They are given timelines and standards to work in. We complete our work by a certain time to then do an official release, where we have a public release party. The students then host this party, while presenting on the work they've done and the products that have been built. The party is completely run by the students. 

We want to partner with other organizations that are similar to our schematic, demographic, and target audience that teach different STEM subjects. We focus on Game Development and Music Production, but would love to partner with organizations that focus on Web Development, Cloud Computing, Network Security, or any other STEM related field. We want to form partnerships with companies and individuals with the passion to teach. We can learn from each other and expand the coverage of spreading the knowledge and wealth regarding technology and STEM. The ways we need help doing that is really awareness of those entities. Increasing branding and awareness of our program will bring us much more closer to building those partnerships. Every time someone is aware of what we're doing that matches what I stated above, we instantly start to discuss the possibility of partnership. So awareness is key. 

School systems, other STEM individuals and organizations, and organizations that focus on supporting our demographic in other ways. So any entities like that, we're willing to partner with. 

We already have partners and examples of how we support each other. So basically we'd like to continue this on a larger scale. We want to continue building a network help be a conduit to larger engine that can supply all resources that the underprivileged communities need to succeed. Especially in the tech STEM field.