There’s a generation of very young coders and app builders who will create the next wave of high-tech tools, and many of them could be right here in the Santa Fe area.
Students from several schools, including Santa Fe High School, Milagro Middle School, and Santa Fe Indian School are in a program guiding them toward creating mainly apps or digital media, culminating in a series of public presentations next week.
It’ll be the second annual student showcase emerging from the Santa Fe Creative Coding Initiative.
SFCCI director, Jim Sanborn, also a faculty member at Santa Fe Community College, says participating learners are not only developing technical and creative skills, they’ll get experience in public speaking.
“ This is taking typical sort of classroom instruction and giving students an opportunity to create with it and then come and represent the work that they've done and actually present it to a fairly large room full of people," Sanborn said.
"We had 120 people at our showcase last year, and third graders and fourth graders with prepared remarks on little cards and standing up in front of the microphone and delivering.”
One of the most notable projects, Sanborn said, is an art curation app that will provide users with an engaging way of browsing through hundreds of pieces on display at La Fonda on the Plaza.
Over the last year or so, seven students interns from five of the area's high schools, including charter schools, have been collaborating on the hotel art project.
Sanborn said the plan is to make the La Fonda app publicly available later this year, underscoring the point that these aren’t just homework assignments, but real-world creations.
Other projects include a film about Santa Fe and more than dozen app prototypes by students from 21st Century Learning Elementary schools.
Sanborn says the coding initiative provides an educational experience that goes beyond what students typically do in school classrooms.
"People are just fired up and proud of what these young people are doing and how they're taking a simple introductory kind of a project and really running with it and making it their own," Sanborn said.
"Students don't have near enough opportunity to take learning and personalize it either as an individual or small group or a class, or in some cases, like last year, a whole school.”
Other schools and organizations with students in showcase include Santa Fe Community College, STEM Santa Fe, and the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Fe.
The Creative Coding Showcase will be held at the Santa Fe Higher Education Center on April 10.
