SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Here at Telmate we just finished running our first-ever, Coding Workshop for Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco. The workshop is a volunteer-led group of eleven developers, QA, and data analysts that was set up to teach coding classes to the club’s middle school kids during the last few weeks of summer school.
When we first started the program, our friends at Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco reached out to us because their kids had expressed a desire to learn coding. We responded to the challenge by working with Telmate’s Engineering Department to come with plan that catered to a variety of young people in a group for their range of abilities.
“We had great time and so did the kids,” said Elan Elango, Director of Engineering at Telmate. “We gave them an overview, installed the Arduino SDK and got them signed up in KhanAcademy, all in the first session.”
The course was broken down into four sessions starting with the “Hour of Code,” then transitioning to Arduino boards to teach the kids Scratch programming or the Arduino language. The goal was to not only make programming fun and motivate the kids, but get them familiar with a electronics (like Arduino boards and hardware).
“I think the coding class is definitely great for the organization,” said Richard Polote, Youth Development Coordinator of the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco. “I tell the kids, use that technology to your benefit, don’t let the technology use you.”
According to Polote, it’s important to have a program like coding in place with a commitment from a company like Telmate. “The kids have had their share of heartbreak with people letting them down, so it’s great to have the volunteers, the desire and the commitment in place.”
The Telmate Cares mission to give back, honor and improve the lives of the people in the communities the company serves. For questions about the Telmate Cares program, please visit www.telmate.com/telmatecares.
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About Telmate:
Telmate is a leading provider of secure corrections and community corrections solutions including inmate phone, tablet, visitation, messaging, education and entertainment content, corrections applications, investigator tools and GPS monitoring. Telmate’s cutting-edge platforms are deployed in over 300 correctional facilities in the U.S. and Canada. Telmate is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Tel*Link Corporation, headquartered in San Francisco, California. To find out more about Telmate, www.telmate.com.
