On August 7th, 2009, 3freshman and 2 sophomore students from Charlotte, NC faced a field ofprogrammers. They made up the youngest team of African American students thatcompeted in this years Annual BDPA High School ComputerCompetition. Regardless of age they had intentions of winning and theyrepresented Charlotte very well, placing in the top 10 teams nation wide.
They had committed the last 8 months worth ofSaturdays to training and learning. Some did not now the very basics of webdevelopment when they started. On that day they were tasked with building aprofessional website using only the most basic of tools, but they had theirwits about them.
They were asked to build a venture capitalistsite, where companies could track monetary request and ROI on therequest. And they were asked to build it in 7 hours.
Today, I can say that I am especially proud ofthese five Charlotte youths. Their accomplishment was no mean feat consideringthat the field of competition was selected from over 1,000 students and manyother teams featured senior high school students.
Every year the BDPA, Black DataProcessing Association, holds the national HSCC program in adifferent city. Every year between 20 and 30 teams come from all over theUnited States to compete. And every year the local Charlotte BDPA chapter hasopened its class to any rising high school student who is willing to listen andlearn about technology. From these young students, 5 are selected to compete inthe regional or national competition. This years national competition was heldin Raleigh North Carolina.
This year the national competition gave out theassignment to the students. It required that they build a venture capitalwebsite. On this site a company could request funds and track the requests. Inaddition to this users of the site could calculate a ROI on the investment.They were allowed no tools other than Notepad and Textpad and their owncreative skills.
They were asked to build the site in 7 hours.This is a testament to their talent as I know some professionals who would behard pressed to provide results in this amount of time.
For those of you who do not know, each year we,the local BDPA chapter, operate a learning class where we teach rising highschool students how to build .NET web pages. We have students of all levelswalk into our classroom, some having little to no computer experience, somehaving programmed for years. Regardless of their level of expertise, it is theprograms responsibility to see that they walk out having learned a little moreabout technology.
The BDPA's mantra is "From the Classroom tothe Boardroom", the Charlotte chapter strives to provide exactly this.
In previous years multiple HSCC students havegone on to internships within software development groups in the local areaWHILE THEY WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL. Winners of the national competition willrecieve scholarships to schools of thier choice. And this year BDPA andaffiliates provided a full 4 year paid scholarship for an HSCC students fromColumbia, SC. We follow through with these students progress as thierprofessional careers develop.
If you have a student that is interested in theprogram, we encourage them to come to our classes. They being the weekend afterthe Superbowl. The sessions are not expensive. Find out more by visiting, http://www.bdpa-charlotte.org
If you are interested in helping thisprogram, in any way, please reach out to me. Someone reached out toyou when you were younger, you should be returning the favor. It makes you feelgood!