We’re asking you to join Operation Spark in helping us raise the funds we need to begin to scale-up production in our software studio, Prototype. In doing so, we’ll be able to work directly with 4 to 6 teams of students, rapidly preparing them to enter the workforce as junior software developers: From now through May 08, 2015, Operation Spark is running a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, become an Operation Spark Operative today…

Continuing our little series of celebrations, I want to celebrate another one of our students, Grace…

I first met Grace at a parent's night event at our office. I had to get up and tell 60 parents why Operation Spark was a winning idea. Software was eating the world, I told them, but we're not pushing our kids toward these awesome, sustainable and well paying careers. The old safe-bets of dentistry and law are no longer safe-bets - in fact, employment rates for students coming out of law school are dismal. Software pays, and there's a lot of jobs, so we need to get software development into schools so our youth have access to this compelling material sooner!

Grace's mother had heard about what we were doing - running bootcamps for New Orleans youth to immerse them in software development - and she asked me if we could include Grace in our summer bootcamp. Being 14 years old, I was reluctant because our approach was to get our students using industrial tools to build real software, and I hadn't exactly worked with many kids younger than 16 - I didn't know if it would be out of reach for a 14 year old.

I got up to present, and there sat Grace listening to me, not very impressed - she's very critical, you know. But that all changed with 2 simple words: video games.

It turns out that Grace had a particular fondness for video games and digital media, like Anime, and knew more of the landscape of this subculture than I did - and I was a video game developer!

After my speech, I sat down with Grace and showed her the game we built out in our last bootcamp, Asteroids. Her eyes lit up! Using the IntelliJ IDE, we mapped out a bunch of problems students had to solve in order to learn concepts like cartesian coordinates, boundary mapping, collision detection, coding physics, creating effects with particle systems - typical 2d video game problems made fun! Grace seemed right at home.

In about 10 minutes I explained object-oriented programming to her, and was struck when she explained it back to me!

Grace made it into our summer bootcamp, becoming one of our best students and one of my all-time favourite human beings. During one episode, I almost shed a tear when I asked my young colleagues why they thought Arrays were faster to loop-over than Objects, and she explained very clearly that integer-indexed elements, regardless of whether they’re stored in an array or an object, are much faster to iterate over than object properties. [Above, is Grace explaining how functions work in Javascript, you can see her live in this video...]

Amazing... at 14. Grace has an incredible mind for logic and deductive reasoning, the two most important problem solving traits to possess to be a kicka** software engineer.

We need to encourage young women like Grace to enter the field of engineering at large - the industry needs this perspective and talent. So we need to make room in our learning centers for young women in technology, to give the them the welcome space and mentorship to shine. Grace is a leader here, and I encourage you to encourage her to mentor those youth coming after her in Operation Spark.

Grace gave me a cupcake at the end of our summer bootcamp - and who doesn't love cupcakes? For this, and her contribution to making Operation Spark an awesome organization, we present her with a life-long membership in Operation Spark, as an Agent of Awesome™!

Keep coming back, Grace! There's no SPARK in Operation Spark without you!