But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building’s past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it’s often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional — often harsh — school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don’t: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district’s four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city’s big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called “.” Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they’re learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

“I saw that just take off,” he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that “everyone should know how to do a range of everything.”

The school’s open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is “something that parents are looking for.”

But it also means much of Building 21’s energy is spent getting students’ skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they’re interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

“What we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what ‘unfinished learning’ looks like in high school — and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,” said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that ������’t sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply ������’t. “I would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.” 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn’t often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly — a district plagued with decrepit building conditions — is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

“Four o’clock in the afternoon,” Shubilla recalled, “the ceiling fell in.”

A ‘backwards-mapped’ curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that’s adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it’s as good as something a college student — or at least a college-ready student — might produce.

“We did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,” said co-founder Chip Linehan, “and we sort of backwards-mapped from there.”

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. “It pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,” he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

“A lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, ‘What can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?’” Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, “I’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.” 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. “His question was always, ‘Why does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?’” said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an “anchor learning site” connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school “as permeable as possible.” 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

“Their saying was, ‘You can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,’” Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school’s name is a sly nod to MIT’s fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT’s legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they’re learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21’s IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He’s also in the middle of a paid “externship” with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company — one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school — sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through “capstone” projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on “the oppression narrative” of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. “And her question was: ‘Why is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?’” 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student’s complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around “enlightenment and empowerment,” such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn’t really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse — or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

“I was on my grades, but iffy about it,” she admitted. “But then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.’”

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she’s got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. “I’m actually paying attention.”

But a few students see things differently. They’re not only fearless about AI, they’re building their studies and future professional lives around it. While many of their teachers are scrambling to outsmart AI in the classroom, these students are embracing the technology, often spending hours at home, in classrooms and dorm rooms building tools they hope will launch their careers.

In a , ACT, the non-profit that runs the college entrance exam of the same name, found that nearly half of high school students who’d signed up for the June 2023 exam had used AI tools, most commonly ChatGPT. Almost half of those who had used such tools relied on them for school assignments. 

The 74 went looking for young people diving head-first into AI and found several doing substantial research and development as early as high school. 

The six students we found, a few as young as 15, are thinking much more deeply about AI than most adults, their hands in the technology in ways that would have seemed impossible just a generation ago. Many are immigrants to the West or come from families that emigrated here. Edtech podcaster Alex Sarlin, who also writes a newsletter focused on edtech and founded the consultancy , ������’t surprised by the demographics. He explained that while U.S. companies typically make headlines in AI, the phenomenon has “truly been a product of global collaboration, and many of its major innovators have been immigrants,” often with training and professorships at top North American universities.

These young people are programming everything from autonomous bicycles to postpartum depression apps for new mothers to 911 chatbots, homework helpers and Harry Potter-inspired robotic chess boards. 

All have a clear message about AI: Don’t fear it. Learn about it.

Isabela Ferrer

Age 17

Hometown Bogota, Colombia

School MAST Academy, Miami, Fla.

What she’s working on: A high school junior at MAST, a public magnet high school focused on maritime studies and science, Ferrer plans to return to Colombia this spring and study computer science in college. She has been working with a foundation called that takes in abandoned and abused children in her home country. She’s developing an AI tool to help the children learn how to read and write Spanish more easily.

“They enter a public school system that expects them to know how to read, but they don’t have these skills,” she said. 

Ferrer is also considering adding more features in the future, such as one that uses AI voice recognition to identify trauma in a student’s voice. 

Once she graduates, she’d like to take a gap year to “get a little more involved in the Colombian startup ecosystem and culture. I also want to travel internationally and possibly keep working on projects like the one I’m working on right now, but on an international scale.” 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “Something I think most people don’t get about AI is that it’s very accessible to everyone,” Ferrer said. “Coding API [application programming interface, which allows two applications to talk to each other] and creating AI models for any specific purpose is very easy and, if done correctly, can be beneficial for different purposes.” 

All the same, she also worries that AI is often used to tackle “very superficial problems” like productivity or data processing. “But I think there’s a huge opportunity to use these technologies to solve real problems in the world … There’s a huge opportunity to close different gaps that exist in emerging markets and in developing countries. And it’s very worth exploring.” 

Shanzeh Haji

Age 16

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Bayview Secondary School, Richmond Hill, Ontario

Once she learned about postpartum depression, Haji began talking to new mothers and family members, including her own mother, who had experienced it. “I realized how big the problem was and how closely connected I was to it.” Haji finished coding the AI chatbot for the as-yet unnamed app and is working on the symptom recognition platform. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “If you look at some of the people who are working in AI and some of the significant impact that AI has made on so many different problems,” she said, “whether it be climate change or medicine or drug discovery, you can just see that AI has significant potential — it can literally transform our lives in a positive way. It really allows for this radical innovation. And I feel like people see more of the negative side of artificial intelligence rather than the positive and the significance that it has on our lives.” 

Aditya Syam

Age 20

Hometown Mumbai, India

School Cornell University

What he’s working on: A math and computer science double major, Syam is part of a longstanding team at Cornell that is developing an AI-powered, self-navigating, , basically a robot bike. “The kinds of applications we are thinking of for this are deliveries and basically just getting things from point A to point B without having a human intervene at any point,” he said. Syam, who is working on the bike’s navigation team, has been honing its obstacle avoidance algorithm, which keeps it from hitting things. 

The project began about a decade ago, he said. “Back then, it was just a theory.” Now they plan to showcase an actual prototype of the bike this spring, probably in March or April, so everyone who has contributed to the project “can see what we’ve built.”

What most people misunderstand about AI: “It’s technology that’s been around for decades,” he said. “It’s just been rebranded in a different way.” ChatGPT, for instance, combines Natural Language Processing and Web access, which results in a kind of “miracle” product. “It seems so great — it can just pull something off the web for you, it can write essays for you, it can edit software code for you. But in its essence, it’s not that different from technologies that have been around before.”

Vinitha Marupeddi

Age 21

Hometown San Jose, Calif.

School Purdue University

What she’s working on: A senior studying computer science, data science and applied statistics, Marupeddi recently led two student teams — one in voice recognition and another in computer vision — developing a robotic, voice-activated modeled after , the 3-D animated game in the Harry Potter books in which the pieces come to life. “We were able to do a lot of high-level robotics using that one project, so I thought that was very cool,” she said. Though the game is still far from being playable, Marupeddi calls it a good use case “to get people interested in robotics and machine learning.” 

Last summer, she interned at a John Deere warehouse in Moline, Ill., where she was set free to work on any project that struck her fancy. Marupeddi looked around the warehouse and saw that Deere had a robot that was being used to track inventory, so she expanded its abilities to cover a wider area. She also worked on a computer vision algorithm that used security camera footage to detect how full certain areas of the warehouse were and determine how much more inventory they could hold.

What most people misunderstand about AI: ”Honestly, I think a good chunk of people are just obsessed with the cheating part of it. They’re like, ‘Oh, ChatGPT can just write my essay. It can do my homework. I don’t have to worry about it.’ But they don’t try to actually understand the material. The people that do use ChatGPT to understand the material are actually going to use it as tutors or use it to ask questions if they don’t understand something.” That divide, between those who reject AI and those who learn how to control it, could grow larger if unaddressed. But learning about AI, she said, will “give people the resources, if they have the drive.”

Vinaya Sharma

Age 18

Hometown Toronto, Canada

School Castlebrooke Secondary School, Brampton, Ontario

What she’s working on: Actually, the better question might be: What ������’t she working on? Sharma, a high school senior, writes code like most of us speak. In part, her work is a response to how little challenge she gets in school these days. “After COVID, I feel schools have gone easier on students,” she said. “I skip school as much as I can so I can code in my room.” The result has been a flurry of applications, from an AI-powered chatbot to handle 911 calls to a power grid simulator to a pharmaceutical app to aid in drug discovery. 

The is still in search of customers, she said, but would be valuable especially in cases where multiple people are calling about the same emergency, such as a car crash. The AI would geolocate the calls and determine if callers were using similar words to describe what they saw. To those who balk at talking to a 911 chatbot, Sharma said the current system in Toronto is often backed up. “It’ll be 100% better than being put on hold and no one assisting you at all.”

The idea was born after she began talking to engineers and energy policymakers and realized that, in her words, “The engineers were very technical, looking at things on a scale of voltages and currents. And the policymakers had trouble communicating with these grid engineers. And I realized that that was one of the bottlenecks slowing down the process so much.” She used design principles pioneered by one of her favorite video games, , to give the two groups a drag-and-drop simulation that both could understand. 

Sharma got interested in drug discovery that Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has a rare form of muscular dystrophy that makes it difficult to walk. He’s investing $100 million on treatments and research for a cure. Sharma said she “fell down a research rabbit hole” and soon realized that the drug discovery process “is honestly broken. It takes more than a decade to bring a drug to market, and it costs, on average, $1 billion to $2 billion,” or about $743 million to nearly $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars.

Her app, BioBytes, aims to bring down both the cost and time needed to bring drugs to market. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: “With any new emerging tech, there’s going to be bad actors that will abuse the system or use it for harm,” she said. “But personally I believe the pros outweigh it. Instead of taking these tools away from us in order to prevent these bad things from happening, I think that people need to realize that the tools are here and people are going to use them. So there needs to be a greater focus on education, of how to use the tools and how to use [them] for good and how it can actually support us.” 

Krishiv Thakuria 

Age 15

Hometown Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

School The Woodlands Secondary School, Mississauga

What he’s working on: Thakuria founded a startup called and is building a set of AI-powered learning tools to help students study more efficiently. The tools let users upload any class materials — study notes, a PDF of a textbook chapter or entire novel or even a teacher’s PowerPoint. From there they can create “an infinite set of practice questions” keyed to the course, Thakuria said. If students get stuck, they can click on an AI tutor customized to the material they uploaded.

The tutoring function is similar to Khan Academy’s AI-powered teaching assistant , but Thakuria said Aceflow’s tool has an advantage: Khanmigo only works, for now, on Khan Academy materials. “In a lot of classes, teachers teach content in very different ways,” he said. “If you can personalize an AI tool to study the material of your teachers, you get learning that’s far more personalized and far more relevant to you, making your studying sessions more effective.” Aceflow users can also create timed study sessions, something neither Khanmigo nor ChatGPT users can currently do.

The new tool is being beta-tested by a focus group of 20, with a 1,400-person waitlist, he said. He and his partners plan to offer it on a “freemium” model, with charges for premium features. Even paying a small amount for unlimited use of the tool makes it available to many families who can’t afford a tutor, Thakuria said, since private tutoring can cost upwards of $10,000 a year. 

What most people misunderstand about AI: That its impact on education will be “binary,” he said. People believe “it’s either a good thing or a bad thing. I think that it can do both. For all the people who worry about AI being a bad thing, I would argue that, well, a hammer can be a bad thing when you give your kid a hammer for the first time to help you out with carpentry work. You have to teach your kid how to use it, right? And without teaching your kid how to use a tool, the tool is not going to be used properly, and that hammer is going to break something.”

It’s the same with AI. “If we can teach kids that smoking is bad for the body, we should teach kids that using AI in certain ways is bad for the brain. But we shouldn’t just focus on the negative effects, because then we’re closing off a future of using AI to solve educational inequity in so many beautiful ways. AI is a technology that can help us scale private tutoring to far more families than can actually afford it now. I think no one should underestimate the positive effects of AI while also safeguarding [against] the negative effects, because two things can be true at once.” 

Watching her older brother lead a math club from the front porch of her family’s quaint coastal home in the Dominican Republic helped foster Rosa Aristy’s love for STEM education as a child.  

Like her brother, Aristy grew up surrounded by family members who taught her the value of investing in others — a commitment she now makes to not only the students in her kids’ homeschool co-op but also their parents.

“That front porch they would sit at was the very first math club I was exposed to,” Aristy told The 74. “Seeing them laugh because they were having so much fun learning together became something I wanted to instill in others.”

Aristy’s upbringing served as the inspiration for , a Houston-based nonprofit that addresses diversity gaps in STEM education through math, robotics and coding programs for homeschool students.

Through the support of the , Bridges to Science has expanded its mission to train homeschool parents on how to teach their children math.

Today, Bridges to Science serves more than 50 homeschool students across Texas with the help of local universities, organizations and volunteers.

“It’s a very near and dear vision of mine…and the intent is to support our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access,” Aristy said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: How would you say your upbringing and being a homeschool mother influenced the creation of Bridges to Science?

When we first moved to Texas, I noticed the school system was really focused on annual testing. It was beginning to rob my children of the joy of learning and I didn’t want that to happen. That was the one thing my parents in particular instilled in me and I want my kids to be lifelong learners. 

One day the moms at my children’s homeschool co-op asked the students to vote on what courses they wanted to learn. They pretty much said they wanted more coding, robotics and STEM classes. The moms and I just stared at each other wondering who would have the courage to teach these classes. No one seemed committed to doing this and I didn’t want to let our students down. I had done some programming before, not the kind they wanted to learn, but I thought that I could learn something child-friendly and get up to speed. 

But before I did that, I was aware that homeschoolers in my community use a curriculum and approach to math that’s memory-based and very common in school systems. I knew that it wasn’t giving the kids the math foundation they needed to go into the sciences. So I said, let me first start off with a math club like my brother’s growing up and once the foundation is set we can do coding next. That’s how Bridges to Science first started out. 

How has Bridges to Science supported homeschool parents teach their children math?

We just got a grant for that and we’re super excited. This summer we’re going to launch a math workshop for parents similar to the ones we have for students. We want parents to have the opportunity to interact with mathematicians and see the beauty of math because it takes a village to impact our children’s lives. If we get parents to bring down their fears about math, they’ll feel more comfortable facilitating inquiry-based sessions with their children. 

I think the stress around math roots from parents wanting to solve the problem for their students and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to rob them of the joy of discovering the way out of those problems. So that’s our intent. We’re using a very solid approach that is backed by research, but we’re tailoring it to the needs of homeschool moms that is culturally relevant and through methods that respond well to their educational scenario.

What is something important to keep in mind when it comes to educating homeschooled families?

Homeschool communities have grown in its diversity and flavors. Sometimes I sense that there’s a stereotype of who we are that doesn’t really reflect who my students are. For example, we’re seeing more families from underprivileged neighborhoods try out homeschooling. And we’re seeing many single moms stepping up to homeschool their children too. They’re not doing it for any ideological reasons but really just for practicality. So I think the world needs to know that homeschooling, at least here in Houston, is a little more diverse than what you may think.

I understand that Bridges to Science is geared for underserved students — primarily Hispanic students. As a Dominican immigrant, tell me more about why it’s important for you to bridge that diversity gap in STEM education.

I like to envision my organization through a spectrum. On one end, we have our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access. On the other end, we have universities, organizations and corporations we work with that have an abundance of resources. We serve as the bridge to unite them so our students can see beyond their existing scenario. 

It’s a very near and dear vision of mine because, in a way, I see myself in them. I grew up in a very small town and my father passed away when I was 12. I had to grow up really fast during my middle school years and get a job to help my mom. You don’t have to go through a big transition like I did, but my life was always at a crossroads. I want our children to explore all the beautiful things they can do in STEM without worry.

You speak about your work with so much love and conviction. Where would you say this energy comes from?

It must be from my mom and dad. Both of them were passionate educators and people who invested into the lives of a lot of people — especially youth. The one thing I learned, particularly from my mom, was to love my students and see them as a whole.

As a kid, I vividly remember my mom stopping me one day from watching videos because we needed to go to someone’s house. I was a typical kid and complained and asked her why me? Why was it so important for us to be there? She told me that she noticed one of her students was sad and realized that her parents were thinking of getting a divorce. So my mom went there to act as a counselor and see if there was anything she could do to help the parents. That really spoke volumes to me. My mom had five kids but she made the time to do those kinds of things. It taught me how important it is to invest in others.

As Bridges to Science continues to expand its reach, what do you hope families take away from their experience?

Half of our students have some sort of adversity attached to them. It could either be due to race, socioeconomic or neurodivergence. When I started Bridges to Science, I set out to give our children the privileges they didn’t have access to. As I’ve invested in my students, I always tell them that they need to pay it forward. And little by little, that’s the vision we have moved towards.

Finley couldn’t get the level to end.

“We just now created our ‘end object,’” he narrated over Zoom to the class, explaining that if a player’s avatar, working its way through the maze, collides with this invisible digital item, it should prompt the computer to display a “You Win” message, end the level, and send the player on to the next one.

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“So far, it still ������’t working,” Finley said cheerfully, alternately checking lines of code and clicking on objects populating the screen. Perhaps it was the code they’d written together, or something else. “So we need to figure out what’s going on here.”

While millions of kids play video games, few get a peek inside the detail-driven and frequently maddening process of creating games. But this summer, as educators puzzle over how to help students catch up on months of disrupted learning due to COVID-19, many are pushing to teach key STEM concepts via game design.

The idea has obvious advantages, supporters say: Kids already love games and spend hours playing and discussing them, so they’re highly motivated to learn the required material. And cracking games’ code open — whether to examine how it works, design new levels or create entirely new games — enables them to do math, logic, and design work they don’t often get in school.

“I like to say we’re giving kids the tools that they need to lead successful lives in the digital age — and preparing them for the coming of the metaverse,” said Ed Fleming, founder of a long-running based in Philadelphia. The metaverse, a term coined by science-fiction novelist Neal Stephenson, refers to an all-encompassing 3-D digital space that resembles those of today’s massive multiplayer games.

Fleming remembers where he was when he first understood the gravity of COVID-19. While attending an educational trade show in Philadelphia in February 2020, a colleague mentioned that the virus had just forced schools in Japan to close. “I told my colleagues, ‘This is going to come to the United States. We have to prepare for this coming summer.’”

He began preparing to move his camp sessions online, where they remain, for the second summer in a row. Sessions run from $169.99 to $249.99 but Fleming offers about 100 scholarships each year to low-income campers.

It may seem ironic that some educators see the solution to online learning loss as more online learning, but both Fleming and his students say the experience is different. Game design and other technology-related topics, they say, translate well to online spaces like Zoom.

Savana Wanex, a rising eighth-grader and “a big gamer” in Orlando, Fla., said the camp’s online classes were actually an improvement over those of her private middle school.

“I was actually surprised at how much better it was than taking school online,” she said. Since most of the classwork is in game design and related fields, “you can team up with other people in games and work side-by-side with them, kind of like you’re close to them.”

She attended school almost entirely in-person last year, spending only a few weeks of class time online due to a short-term quarantine after a classmate tested positive for the virus. But Savana admitted, “Digital school is very hard.” The larger difficulty, she said, lay in wearing masks all day and maintaining six feet of social distance between herself and others.

“It’s just been a really weird year because you haven’t really been able to do those big group projects — you can’t really get together.”

Now in its 19th year, Fleming’s camp actually goes beyond simple maze games like the one that Nathan Finley and his students puzzled over. Aimed at students as young as second graders and as old as high school seniors, it offers lessons in computer coding and game design, but also in the visual arts and digital video, as well as more esoteric topics such as the Physics of Amusement Parks — all subjects required to build a complete and satisfying 3-D game.

The camp also invites students to create original content using advanced software routinely used by professional game designers, making the experience “a great introduction to computer science,” said longtime game design teacher Steve Isaacs. “There’s the art piece, the sound engineering piece. It’s such a cross-curricular area. And again, kids love games, so why not capitalize on their agency in that area?”

Recent statistics from the Entertainment Software Association, the trade organization for the video game industry, suggest that gaming among young people, even as other entertainment forms such as streaming movies and social media abound. About three-fourths of people under 18 play video games weekly — though the average player is 31 years old — and nearly half of gamers are female.

Fleming started the camp in 2003, with about 200 students — only one of them a girl, he noted. Now girls comprise about 40 percent of his 1,300 campers. In fact, two recent sessions — one focused on the building game Roblox and another on digital fashion design — were attended only by girls.

Not just consuming but creating

A lifelong gamer, Fleming can trace the growth of his camp to his grad student days teaching e-commerce at Penn State University Great Valley, a remote campus west of Philadelphia. When the dot.com bubble burst, the university found itself with six classrooms of computers, but no students.

Fleming suggested bringing younger students onto campus to design games and applications.

The program started out teaching students the basics of tools like the since-discontinued Macromedia Flash from Adobe. It now routinely puts students through the paces of working in Unreal Engine, the software used to create Fortnite.

“I grew up with Atari joysticks,” Fleming said. “And now the kids are growing up having the monolith in their hand and access to everything you could ever imagine.” He held up a glass-slab mobile phone to illustrate his point. “We just give them the tools to actually make that monolith do things that they want it to do.”

Dave Kramer, who has taught at the camp, and whose 13-year-old son Aiden attends it, said creating media, not just consuming it, was a huge motivation. The boy was eager to attend once he understood that “you can be the person making those videos or making those games … instead of you just watching someone playing someone’s game. That really did intrigue him.”

But after a year of remote schooling, he was reluctant to place the boy into a summer program built around Zoom sessions and computer programming. “My concern was too much screen time,” he said. “And how we worked that out was once you got off of school or camp, then there was no other screen time pretty much for the rest of the day, except for earned time.”

He said the program has “actually worked out very, very well” for Aiden, who loves video games, movies, and YouTube videos. “He loves Fortnite, he loves Minecraft — you know, typical 13 year old.”

A creative “sandbox” leads the way

Epic Games, creators of the wildly popular Fortnite series, actually built the first version of Unreal Engine in 1998, and it has since become highly influential in game design circles.

Epic Games’ Isaacs, himself a former special education and technology teacher, transitioned into the game design world from K-12 education. He and his wife, also a teacher, opened a computer training and gaming center that offered afterschool and summer programs. Eventually he persuaded his New Jersey school district to let him offer game design to middle schoolers in Basking Ridge, N.J., west of Newark.

Isaacs wrote the curriculum and built a program that offered not just game design but digital storytelling, and focused on iterative design, a process used in many areas that emphasizes improving on previous versions of a product.

“My feeling was (that) I was providing an opportunity for kids to find their passion,” he said. “There are so many different roles in the game design industry. I think it’s neat for kids to start to understand that there are different options that they can pursue.”

In 2018, Epic Games a “sandbox” version of Fortnite that allows players to modify the game’s features and create their own “islands,” mini-games, and other assets.

Isaacs, a serial education entrepreneur who has also produced content for , a massive Minecraft “fan experience,” saw an opportunity for educators. Last year, after more than two decades in the classroom, he retired and now is part of a that trains teachers on how to use Fortnite and its underlying engine for learning.

Fleming’s camp is using the Epic curriculum, even as the founder himself worries about what the Delta variant of COVID-19 holds for students in the fall.

“I definitely feel for this generation of kids,” he said. “I’ve tried to provide a platform for them to connect and engage and have fun while also learning.”

Thora Hicks, a rising eighth-grader in Pennsylvania, said she and a fellow camper at a previous session of Fleming’s camp became close friends playing and experimenting with the adventure “sandbox” game Terraria. “And we’re still friends online to this day.”

Hicks, who admitted she’s “really interested in YouTube horror stuff,” said people unfamiliar with virtual worlds like Roblox and Minecraft may not know the platforms make it easy to explore interests and make friends. “I mean, there’s more stuff to do than IRL [in real life]. It’s kind of like an enhancement of the real world — you’re allowed to have fun and to meet new people and just have a good, fun time with people from all over the world. And it’s an easier way to find people with the same interests as you.”

Kramer, whose son Aiden attends the camp, said Fleming’s program works because his instructors are leveraging kids’ love of games and “showing them that there’s math and science in there, along with art and storytelling and creative writing — all these aspects that they might struggle with in school, they’re now finding that avenue to get them interested in all of those things.”

More than four years after she and her father created an app designed to connect incarcerated parents with their children, teenage coder “Jay Jay” Patton — the subject of a recent short —has not slowed down.

When she was a toddler, Jay Jay’s father Antoine went to prison for more than seven years, leaving her and her teenage mother. Because of her personal experience with her father, Jay Jay understood the consequences and struggles of staying in communication and bonding with an incarcerated parent.

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After her father’s release, they grew close through coding and created Photo Patch, an app that allows children to communicate with incarcerated parents through photos and letters.

Now 16, Jay Jay continues to build a strong community for those who have parents and loved ones in prison.

In 2018, Jay Jay became the youth leader of Unlock Academy, an online coding school created by her father to make coding more accessible to marginalized communities such as young people of color.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Going back to the beginning, when you and your father were separated, what incentivized you to go into coding and to work with your father to help others? 

I knew firsthand, the struggles and how hard it was to be able to communicate with my father… So when he had this idea, it just made sense for me to help because I just knew how it felt. And I wanted to be the person who can help other kids instead of just sitting back and just watching.

What is the most important thing you’d like to come out of Photopatch?

The best thing is being able to reach across the 2.7 million kids who have an incarcerated parent and be able to bridge that gap of communication and keep that bond intact. When a parent goes to prison and they’re not with their child, it disfigures this bond they might have once had, the parents missing out on stuff, and the kid is just sad. I see this a lot with family and friends who have an incarcerated parent. It’s hard to keep that same bond. And I look at how me and my dad were able to even though he was away, we were able to still have a strong bond.

And when you and your father were not together, was there anyone else who helped you pave the way? 

I had my mom most of it. She was a single mom trying to figure it out, but she just always wanted the best for me my whole entire life. She got pregnant at 16, and had me at 17. So she was trying to pave the way for me to be a great kid. She didn’t grow up with such a great childhood. So my mom was always my best friend, and I was always her best friend, because she was young. And I was the only person she kind of had, and she was so independent. And I got a lot of those independent tendencies from her, wanting to do things on my own and wanting to flourish.

If you could go deeper into how you got into coding, not just how you were introduced but how you continued it as well?

I actually learned coding from my dad because this was something he was passionate about. And he was coming up with all these cool ideas. This is what he wanted to do, after being in prison. While in prison, he taught himself how to code. Being able to still connect with my dad and build that bond with my dad….So he was really excited that I wanted to get into this and he’s thought why not teach my own daughter these skills I know. He was always giving me little activities to do and just being a great teacher.

Did school ever foster that passion for coding? Or was it something you had to pursue out of classes and school?

… in school, there was no technology or coding classes, which drove me to want to learn more, and be somebody who can teach….other women of color, and girls, and people who don’t have the opportunity to be able to learn this skill. It was just strictly learning from my dad, we didn’t have that in school. When I was in middle school one of my teachers knew what me and my dad were doing, and she thought it was really cool, and she had a group of kids who were doing technology. And they wanted to do coding also so my dad actually came to our school and did like a whole class for coding after school. We’d have a lot of different kids, and you just never knew these kids had interest in this and, if it would have been like a whole regular class, who knows where these kids would go with it?

Could you give me updates on Unlock Academy? How’s that going and updates on that as well, and what do you hope people get out of it? 

We’ve been doing really great. We’ve been getting a lot of new students. Since the whole pandemic has come, it’s been actually better because more people are at home. And they are trying to find something to do… It’s a really big effort for me to try to get women of color and women in general and kids and people who feel marginalized into the tech space so that they feel like they can do anything. The tech space is not as diverse as it can be and as it should be. So that’s really our mission for Unlock Academy, to get people who really feel like they want to do it, or that they can’t do it, and put them into this world…Don’t psych yourself out, don’t let other people kind of steer you away from it. We want to be able to be the people that are able to stem their career and get them into this world.

What do you think of the racial gender and inequity in the tech world? Why does it exist and how do you think we should fix it? 

I think it’s there because these people are not given the resources. There’s just nowhere really for them to easily obtain it…you can go to college and take classes, but it’s a lot of money…they don’t have all this kind of money to be going to take the big classes for these courses. Or even if they do, it’s just not marketed to them in a way that they can do it. There’s a stereotype around coding that it’s this crazy thing, and you have to be a genius or a mathematician….Like when you see it in movies, it looks like the matrix… When I first saw my dad doing it, I thought the same thing too at 10 years old…but when you actually get into it, it’s really not as crazy. Because my dad and I both came into the coding world, unknowingly, we understand why it seems crazy….we thought the same thing…I definitely think that’s why there’s a barrier because it’s just not marketed to our people in a way they can do it. And that’s how we plan to help is to give it to them in an affordable way, but also in a way they feel like they can do it.

Was there a moment where you realize this is really making a difference? Any moment of gratification that you can think of?

When stories started to come out, and brought a lot of awareness to us, and more people were in my DM’s or comments, people were telling me like, how much of an inspiration I am. And for me, I’m a very humble person… It’s kind of surreal for me, because I’m actually making a difference.

Nancy Mastronardi does all kinds of art with her students at Joella C. Good elementary school in Miami. Some weeks it’s drawing and painting, other weeks it’s weaving and pottery. At the Title 1 school, creativity is on display everywhere you look—from the sunshine-yellow tile mosaic flanking the school’s entrance to the painted superhero vegetables by the garden.

But when the pandemic hit and learning went remote, and then hybrid, Mastronardi—who’s been teaching for 29 years—had to adapt. She traded her classroom for an art cart that went room-to-room, and began Zooming online half the time. But at home, her students didn’t have supplies like clay or oil pastels.

“A lot of the kids weren’t putting in the kind of work that I’m capable of getting out of them when I’m in class. And I couldn’t give them much variety because I relied on those supplies to provide a rich experience,” she says. “I knew I had to give them something else.”

Then, Mastronardi was introduced to a summer virtual training with the Miami nonprofit . Founded by MIT grad Amy Renshaw in 2016, the goal is to delight and inspire girls, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, with the “creative possibilities of computer programming.” They do this by training art teachers with lessons that combine art and coding. There are also weekly Code/Her clubs for elementary and middle school girls, Future Female Tech Leaders program for high schoolers, and Code/Art Fest, an annual community-focused conference that celebrates the girls’ achievements.

With Miami a freshly minted tech hub, Renshaw sees the city as an ideal place to nurture a new generation of female talent in an otherwise inequitable industry. The result? Male-bias design can be seen everywhere, whether in or voice recognition software that .

“We’re going to miss out on technology that’s going to give us a wider range of solutions if we don’t have a more diverse workforce,” says Renshaw.

Art as a way to pique girls’ curiosity makes sense to Renshaw—art skews female when it’s an elective, and there’s more flexibility in the curriculum. : Girls’ interest in computer science increases when the classroom environment reflects art and nature rather than stereotypical geeky decor, like Star Trek posters. Research also shows , at which point cultural stereotypes are already taking root.

So in 2019, Code/Art started training public school art (and some tech) teachers in partnership with the Miami-Dade School District. Teachers who volunteer for the training can satisfy continuing education requirements by learning four lessons: an abstract art generator and donut maker game in , coding self-portraits using JavaScript, and 3-D modeling on Tinkercad.

To create a comfortable learning atmosphere, facilitators are open about their own struggles and encourage the teachers to tap into each other’s knowledge and experience. They are assisted by college-age interns, who are then available to help in the classroom.

“They’re very patient, and explain things clearly and easily,” says art educator Edna Chueiri. “If a third grader can do it, we can do it.”

There’s no other model like Code/Art in the country. To date, they’ve trained teachers from 100 schools, 68% of those being Title 1 schools. Still, coding your own nose is one thing. Teaching kids to do theirs is another. A little less than half of teachers have implemented the lessons, although Renshaw believes that more have simply gotten hung up in paperwork when reporting back to Code/Art.

During the pandemic, with the shift to virtual, momentum has inevitably slowed down—56 teachers participated in the training in 2020 compared to 109 in-person the year before. But for Mastronardi, the pandemic was as good a time as any to try the lessons with her second through fifth graders. Other art teachers who struggled to engage their students said the same. Turns out, the Miami-Dade school district lending out 105,000 laptops worked in their favor.

At first, the girls in Mastronardi’s classes were shy. But after a few weeks, when they saw their projects were as successful as those shared by the boys, they opened up. They became more comfortable asking questions, and Mastronardi says the girls can’t wait to click “share screen” these days. The lessons have also helped Mastronardi skirt the burnout educators have been experiencing during the pandemic.

“They’ve kept me energized,” she says. “And I still can teach color theory and drawing skills.”

The lessons aren’t for everyone. But for those who have been attending Mastronardi’s class, the lessons were exciting enough that a handful of girls began meeting independently on Zoom. Mastronardi also started a virtual Code/Her club that gathers Wednesdays after school.

Zaria Francis, a third grader at Joella C. Good and aspiring ballerina, is in the club. Her parents decided to keep her in remote learning for the entire year—. Francis never knew what coding was before digitally decorating a donut with gummy bears. Now, she’s creating Scratch projects all the time, her latest a ballet scene featuring a little girl inspired by Misty Copeland. Code/Art has not only given Francis more confidence in math and science, but a way to cope.

“When the pandemic started, I felt really sad because I couldn’t see my friends,” she says. “The club helped me see my friends and helped me practice coding.”

It’s too soon to tell how effective Code/Art is in encouraging girls to continue with tech as a career. Screen fatigue has taken its toll during the pandemic, with participation in Code/Her clubs down a third from last year. But in a recent survey of 23 girls from the clubs, 52% said they plan to major or minor in computer science in college and 87% said their club motivated them to continue coding in the future.

This summer, Code/Art plans on training 50 more art teachers. Renshaw and her team also launched a monthly donor program to support classrooms and clubs, and are figuring out how to get more computers as the district has begun collecting them. Luckily for Mastronardi, her principal has given her classroom a set of laptops for the fall.

Ultimately, Renshaw hopes to bring the Code/Art model to other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and New York City. As a first step, Code/Art Fest included a “Code Your City Challenge” this year. Girls from all over the country to the category of self-portraits, which Renshaw says “changes what a coder looks like.”

Sixth grader Fatima Hernandez, who participates in a Code/Her club in Miami, won first place for 6th-8th grade in the Southeastern region. Her portrait reflects her future, about which she is certain: She plans to earn at least two doctorates, become an aerospace engineer, and build spaceships—because they’re “basically huge computers that can fly.” In her portrait, against a blue background with white dots, she is smiling and holding a robot. An astronaut helmet frames her head. On her spacesuit, a badge for NASA.

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with