Q&A with South Bend Code School co-founder Alex Sejdinaj
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After moving back from Nashville, Tennessee, for a job as a business intelligence associate with the University of Notre Dame, Alex Sejdinaj soon teamed up with his now wife, Alex, and Chris Frederick, an assistant teaching professor of data science at Notre Dame, to launch South Bend Code School.
The trio have since gone on to create two other ventures, GiveGrove, a fundraising platform for not-for-profits, and Code Works, a digital product design studio.
Sejdinaj spoke with Inside INdiana Business about starting the coding program, pivoting during the pandemic and next steps for the not-for-profit. This article has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you start South Bend Code School?
My now wife, and I and our third co-founder, Chris Frederick, started the program back in 2015. Chris and I were both working at Notre Dame and we wanted to do some sort of skills development/workforce training. We were actually looking to do it for adults at the time, but wound up working with kids at the Robinson Community Learning Center. We met my now wife, Alex, who was already experimenting with computer science programming for youth.
She had started a program in the spring of 2015. We joined her in the summer and started South Bend Code School. It was a five-week summer camp program at the Robinson Center for middle and high school students. The program went really well; all of the students in that program built applications over the course of the program. The projects were all civic-minded, so apps to make the community better. At the end of the program, they did a presentation for the community. We also took a trip to Google’s offices in Chicago. The kids got to present their applications and talk with folks who worked at Google, learning about what it would be like to work at Google.
Is this still part of what the program looks like now?
When we first started the program, it took us a little while to build the model. We started out with these program partnerships where we worked with the Robinson Center, the Boys and Girls Club, the Juvenile Justice Center, etc. In the fall of 2016, we started our open enrollment program. With our program partnerships, the way we had structured them, we didn’t always have long-term engagement. We didn’t always know where we were going to be next.
One of the big things we’ve always been passionate about is making technology education equitable and accessible for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic demographic, race or gender. So with the help of some local partners, we were able to build a scholarship fund for students that enabled us to create an open enrollment after-school program and summer camps from 2016 until the pandemic happened.
By the time the pandemic hit, we had four locations in Indiana: South Bend, Elkhart, Fort Wayne and Bloomington. We closed all of our locations and had to stop all of our programming because of all the shelter-in-place mandates. We had to cancel what was going to be our biggest summer camp season yet; it was really unfortunate. We tried to do some virtual programming but it just didn’t work well, we didn’t feel like we’re having the same impact.
Sejdinaj speaks about how the pandemic forced the school to pivot and what programming is in store for students this fall.
At the same time, the states of Indiana and Michigan both had computer science mandates coming down the education pipeline. So kids as young as grade four could be tested on computer science concepts for state standardized testing. We ended up pivoting a little bit into working directly with educators in schools. We’ve worked with about 30 schools at this point across Indiana and Michigan to help them get computer science going for their systems.
Even though state standards have existed in both Indiana and Michigan for a few years now, schools are still catching up to it in some capacity. So we come in and we provide lesson plans and training for educators to get them up to speed and get them comfortable with teaching computer science in their classes.
However, starting this fall, we don’t have an exact date yet, we are going to be opening our after school program backup for South Bend and St. Joe County. We’ve just gotten confirmation on some scholarship dollars and are rebuilding that pool for students. In the next few weeks, we should be releasing some dates.
For the after school programs, are they in the schools or are they at your facility? Does South Bend Code School have its own facility?
We don’t have a facility. We will typically work with a community partner. We don’t have confirmation yet on the space. We have a few options. We’re weighing where would be the most central and most convenient for the students we work with. We’re trying to enable kids to make it from all corners of the county. Sometimes we have outlier students who are coming in from Michigan. Before COVID, some of our students were driving up to an hour, maybe a little longer, to get to our programs. So the location has to be accessible and a lot of it hinges on being able to get the scholarship dollars locked down. We have our first round ready to go, so we should have enough scholarship dollars for the first year of programming.
What exactly do your programs teach the kids?
The youngest students we work with in our after school programs would be grade three. They will start with a lot of what we call unplugged activities as well as block-based programming languages. So unplugged activities are our games that don’t require a computer but still teach some concepts regarding computer science. The block-based programming languages include tools from code.org and MIT Scratch. We’re always looking to see what else is out there and what else we can introduce into the classroom.
The concepts kind of build up from there. Things get more complex, a little bit deeper into some of the theory side, while keeping things fun and engaging and entertaining for kids. And it’s always project-based. We’re always trying to get the students to build a game or a project or something that they can be proud about at the end.
By the time we’re in middle school, students start to get into actual programming languages. They start with coding languages, typically just some very easy front end manipulations. So UI/UX related stuff like HTML and CSS, just to get something on the screen and manipulate the screen with code. Beyond that, students start to get into deeper topics, sometimes it’s JavaScript or Python. We’ve done some unity programming, etc. But that’s the progression; it starts off really easy and friendly, then as students get more comfortable, we move on.
The big thing is we want to make computer programming inviting to students with different interests as well. A lot of students who are math- or science-focused can find a home in computer science, but there’s a lot of room in computer science for students who are focused on arts and humanities as well. A lot of students with leanings towards those skills or preferences would actually find more of a home in computer science because a big part of it is relating to the human side and making things that are useful for people. So understanding empathy and the human condition is very important when it comes to developing.
And what does the programming look like for your adult students?
Our adult programs started in 2021. We worked with the city of South Bend to pilot a program for adult learners. We hypothesized that there would be a need for programming for adult learners who might not know that computer science is out there. They might know that programming is a thing and they might have a little bit of knowledge, enough to know might be interested in this kind of thing but maybe not enough knowledge to know really where to dive in and possibly not enough time to find that out for themselves in the most effective way.
For example, if you’re Googling these things, you get a lot of results fed back to you and sometimes it can be hard figuring out what the best pathway is for you. So we built a program called Intro to Careers in Coding, over the course of four class days, it gives insight into four different verticals within development. The idea is that by the end of the program, you might have a better sense of where you see yourself fitting into the bigger picture of computer science as a profession.
We got support through the READI program and the city is still continuing to support. We’re running those monthly now. We’ve also opened up a generative AI course that we run on occasion as well. The program is also absolutely free for adults also, and no knowledge of coding or computer programming is required to participate.
Who teaches the classes?
We have two great instructors, both named David. We’re the team of double names. Both Davids are professional developers in the state. So they both have knowledge of the topics they’re teaching first-hand; they both know what it means to have a career in the field in a very relevant way. Chris Frederick, one of our co-founders, teaches the generative AI course.
What about the classes for the kids?
We have instructors that we work with. We don’t know who’s going to be teaching it fully this upcoming round yet; we still have to make our hires there. In the past, it’s been a combination of technology professionals, educators and a fair number of college students who are CS majors or in STEM-related majors.
Have there been any students who have gone into computer science professionally over the past nine years of organizing the different programs?
Yeah, I have a few in mind actually. We’ve tried to keep in communication with students as much as we can. We have one young man who started attending the program back when he was in middle school in 2016. He came in on the first day and the first thing he said to anyone was, “I’m not good at math. Am I going to be good at this?” And our team reassured him that it’d be okay. We just heard from him last summer. He got into Western Michigan University’s computer science program. That’s an interesting one, where you had a student who wouldn’t have thought about this at all wound up taking the program and now he’s attending school for it.
We have a lot of students who write to us down the line to impress on us just how impactful they thought the program was. We have a former student right now, who seems to be doing really well at IBM. We have another student, who’s actually an engineer now in town. We have a student who leveraged her interest in computer science to actually go to business school. She’s majoring in entrepreneurship because early on, she built an app in a competition at her college and wound up getting solicited by the business school. Those are some of the ones that jump off the top of my mind but I know we have many more.
Are there any plans to relaunch your operations in other parts of the state?
The way that kind of happened initially was just through conversation and what made sense at the time. I think we have to play it similarly now. We’re constantly looking for ways to make our program relevant and fun. When we started the program, the conversation was about what was the coolest thing we could do around computer science for youth and that was the program we tried to build.
We’re always happy to talk with folks and other people in the state about expanding and what opportunities there are. We’re also happy to talk with schools and after school programs about what they can do. We’re happy to assist them with spinning up their own programs as well. There’s no sense of competition in our hearts over computer science programming. When we started out, we were a little concerned about saturating the market but I don’t think that’s possible. From our experience, the students who get interested in this stuff, want the outlet and they want it as much as they can get it.
Is there anything you wanted to mention that I haven’t asked about yet?
Maybe just an important metric to throw in. We had almost 600 students participate in after school programs prior to the pandemic, 47% were minority students. That’s really great, especially for a computer science-related program. That’s a metric we’re going to continue to pursue.