Code Lab

As a result of the Third Industrial Revolution, the last few years were marked by constant technological development. In the 2000s, the importance of technology in today's society became irrefutable, being fundamental for the maintenance and guarantee of the quality of life in multiple areas such as health and communication. Due to this, learning a programming language has become a need around the world, which is most fully met by countries such as China, Russia, and Japan, leaders in programmers training.

However, this is not the reality in Brazil - a country that suffers from strong social inequality. Learning how to code, although necessary, is expensive, turning the teaching of programming elitist. This can be clearly seen by the fact that, until today, there are no surveys about the profile of programmers in the country. Resulting in an inability to know what kind of Brazilian social groups are having the opportunity to join the I.T job market, making it hard to understand the real flaws in the business-corporate environment.

Therefore, this lack of data, silently, shares the exclusion of disadvantaged young people in STEM, who are mostly from peripheries, blacks, women, LGBTQIA+, and people with disability. As a consequence, the cycle of poverty and inequalities keep going through society, affecting more people each year, and not allowing them to achieve social ascension through knowledge. 

Code Lab aims to solve the lack of democratization of programming education in Brazil.

Code Lab is a social initiative that promotes free programming education to young Brazilians. After recruiting volunteer mentors, we run an application process for committed young people who want to change their communities through programming and technology. 

Currently, our work is based on:

1) Mentorship Program: For 3-6 months, approximately 30 young people choose to learn a programming language with regular 2-hour weekly classes. These classes take place online with volunteer mentors.

2) Workshops: As the demand of young people wanting to learn programming is high, we also conduct workshops once a year that introduce topics about programming and technology. To host these workshops, we invite high-rated professionals in Brazil to share more about their experiences in the I.T market. The workshops have no application process, just registration for those interested.

Besides that, this year we created new strands to the project, aiming to increase our impact and promote diversity among our beneficiaries. 

I) Code Her - which will promote during the year workshops, mentorships, and events for people who identify as a woman in order to promote gender equality in the technology environment.

II) Code LGBTQI+ - segment that will promote workshops, mentorships, and events for queer people with the goal of increasing diversity in STEM spaces.

III) Code Blacks - program that will focus its efforts on increasing the number of black people in the STEM job market. Promoting mentoring and training, especially for those who had educational gaps during elementary and high school.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, about 50 million people in Brazil are between the ages of 15 and 29. In addition, to study our target audience, we conducted a survey with more than 100 young people between 14 and 24 years old in order to understand their knowledge about programming. About 60% of them do not know how to program, and about 10% do not even know what programming is.

Our target audience is, above all, young people from public schools and low-income students who want to learn programming, aiming at social impact.  

These young people, in most cases, leave school without knowing the minimum expected from math, English, and other skills necessary for day-to-day life. With that said, learning programming is practically utopian in Brazilian public high schools. From the expertise they will have during the classes, they will develop logical thinking, English skills, and also job opportunities since the technology field is growing exponentially every day.

Our team is made up of people who have been positively impacted in some way by learning technology and/or programming.

João Santos (Founder) - During my high school, I could learn computer science as a technical course besides the regular subjects. Coming from a family that could not afford a private high school, studying in a public institution that offered me access to research and development in technology was a watershed for my personal and professional growth. In my sophomore year, I could develop a prototype web system to help my community scheduling health appointments. The project was a success and I presented it at several science fairs around Brazil. However, while I was receiving recognition for my application, many of my friends who studied with me before high school did not even know what programming was. From that moment on I knew that I needed to create some solution so that more young people could learn programming if they wanted to.

Cléo Figueiroa: Studying computer science during high school, I noticed several times how my teachers and classmates treated me and other female classmates differently. Such treatment, for the most part, consisted of the false observation that we were less capable of understanding the subjects being discussed. After understanding more about sexism in the workplace, I was able to further understand the lack of women in the STEM field. Thus, I co-founded Code Lab, seeking to increase the visibility of girls in the study of technology.

Lúcio Campos (Operation Trainee): Developing a great interest in technology in childhood, in high school I had the opportunity to enter a technical course in Digital Games, where I began my studies in programming. In it, I learned the main languages, 3D modeling, and also a little bit about data analysis. Near my conclusion, looking for ways to further develop my involvement in the STEM area, I joined Code Lab, where I started to observe the importance of the I.T. market and how its teaching is unequal to the Brazilian youth.

Financial: In Code Lab, we aim to expand the project to the face-to-face environment, so we can reach more communities that don't have access to digital media. However, for this goal to happen, it is necessary to mobilize people, digital resources (laptops, cell phones), face-to-face space, etc. Unfortunately, meeting these needs requires funding, a barrier that prevents us from realizing our dream. With the help of MIT Solve, we can connect with large companies that can provide us, through partnerships, with the resources we need to reach these communities. In addition, we can restructure our financial sustainability system so that we can be independent in most of the project's growth.

Technical: Code Lab aims to teach programming in a different way from what is taught in the large educational institutions in Brazil. To do this, we would like to implement more and more experiential teaching in our mentorships through the creation of a website (classroom space), where students could interact and discuss code construction. In addition, we want to have a tool aimed entirely at the mentor, where he or she can: have a direction of the organization's teaching method and see the progress of the students in applying what they have learned.

Legal: We are looking for support in building collaboration contracts with partners and formalizing our organization as an NGO.

Market: Like programming, we understand the importance of data. For this reason, we are looking for support in building a database to understand which programming languages are most in need and what impact our alumni are making in their communities.

From the pairing of volunteer teachers and students, we have established a free, individualized learning methodology that is not found in other institutions that teach programming. In addition, throughout the mentoring period, the mentees are exposed to a series of workshops that develop socio-educational skills, preparing them to develop their own projects and solve the problems of their communities from the knowledge of technology. 

Until next year, Code Lab aims to raise a financial fund to achieve long-term goals. For that, we intend to make a Hackathon, in which we will offer personal and professional development to the participants, raising funds to improve our impact. Seeking to be able to receive donations and start partnerships, we also intend to start the process to have a “CNPJ” (a unique number that identifies a legal entity by the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service) by the middle of 2022, which will turn our project into a legal NGO. 

In the next five years, with legal recognition and expansion of our mentorships, we want to create a free website with the content of programming languages, made by our own mentors and volunteers. This website will allow those who are interested to learn how to code to learn by themselves, with a core curriculum of programming. Ambitiously, we also will have a project headquarters in Salvador - BA, which will enable us to make partnerships with schools in the city, reaching more disadvantaged students.

Code Lab has had 2 full cycles with 60 mentees total. As a form to know what the mentees are thinking about our mentorship, and seeking to know about our real impact on their lives, we conduct monthly feedback during the cycles. This way, we can analyze our pros and cons. 

After the cycle, in a way to know about how our alumni are using the knowledge acquired in our mentorship, we keep in touch through emails and invitations to our events. So, we are able to hear stories like Eduarda Moreira, who after the mentorship, was approved to be an intern at an Artificial Intelligence startup. We also have mentees who after participating felt extremely engaged with programming and participated in international and ones who started to create social projects like ours to help their communities. 

In addition, last year we were one of the ten projects awarded by Prudential as volunteer initiatives that were positively impacting Brazil. 

The entire Code Lab team believes that quality education is the key to ending social inequalities. In Brazil - a country marked by slavery and colonization, there’s still a large gap between the social classes. By observing that, and also at the needs of the globalized world, in which technology is increasing in an exponential way,  we believe that we can make the STEM market a way to reduce poverty in the country.

For this, we seek to impact and offer to people in social vulnerability free classes of programming. That way, those people become able to change their own reality and their community through the knowledge of tech, reducing the social inequalities and opening more doors of opportunities in Brazil.

Our organization treats technology as something that should be taught and passed on so that more and more people can benefit from this knowledge.

We use technology to teach technology, through mentoring that takes place in virtual meeting platforms (created through programming code) where we teach the programming languages that can be used to create technology and make an impact.

Code Lab has as one of its goals to increase diversification in the programming market. This fact is reflected in the diversity of the team: about 90% of our team identifies as LGBTQIA+, 50% of our team is composed of women and 60% of our team identifies as black. In order for this not to be temporary, the project team is concerned with diversity especially when hiring new people to the team, always taking into account their background, because we believe that the more diverse the project team is, the more different points of view and opinions we will have, which generates richness in our project.

Code Lab is a leading social project that wants to teach programming to vulnerable communities. We help these communities by teaching programming and its applications for free, through mentoring by university students, or professionals, who want to contribute to the project. Currently, knowing how to program is a small but important skill that allows many of our students from low-income communities to have the chance to get a job, bringing income to their community and family.

Because of this, many of our students come to the project to access this skill that can change their family's financial reality, since a job in technology pays better than a job in telemarketing for example.

The soul of Code Lab is our free mentorships for young people and minorities in our country. Thinking about that, we look for financial solutions that are consistent with our goal:

I) Hackaton: We plan to hold annual hackathons in which we will offer personal and professional development, as well as a cash reward for the first place. To make this possible, participation in our hackathons will be paid, with the possibility of financial aid. The surplus earnings from our Hackaton would be invested in the organization, in didactic material, and in our ambassador program.

II) CodeLab Products: We plan to sell products that carry our organization's logo, such as t-shirts, notebook stickers, mugs decorated with lines of programming code, cell phones, notebook covers, etc.

III) Donations: We intend, as the organization grows, to find entities that want to contribute financially to our goal: to democratize the teaching of programming, especially for minorities in Brazil.

IV) Partnerships with state government and private schools: Unfortunately, the teaching of programming in primary and secondary schools in Brazil is discouraged. With this in mind, we will partner with the state government and private schools so that Code can teach programming language, and all the applications that can be made inside and outside the school (such as educational games, applications to implement small businesses, etc). In return, we would like to charge a fee for the implementation of the project segment and to support the organization's instructors, as well as its expansion.

Code Lab was created in the midst of the pandemic when everyone's life went online. Because of this, we had difficulty realizing our goals in person. However, even in the face of difficulties, we sought funding to make the project happen. With the foundation of the project, we participated in the incubation of the Latin America Leadership Academy (LALA) in partnership with Schmidt Futures. Fortunately, we were one of the winners and received U$300 for the needs of the project. Also, in 2021, we were approved in the program conducted by 1Bi Labs and are competing for a prize of U$2000.