Today we are excited to announce the winners of the AzureDev community campaign and donate $100,000 to five nonprofits focused on technology education. Introduced at Build 2013, the AzureDev campaign focuses on changing the world through code, regardless of programming language. To kick things off, we asked you to vote for your favorite nonprofit dedicated to providing technology education. Having tallied more than 20,000 votes from the community, we are thrilled to announce the winners:
First Place Winner ($50,000):Black Girls Code
Mission: Black Girls Code is a movement focused on introducing young girls of color to computer programming, mobile app development, robotics and other STEM fields.
What this grant means to your organization, by Kimberly Bryant:“By reaching out to the community through workshops, hackathons and after-school programs, Black Girls Code introduces computer programming and technology to girls from underrepresented communities. This grant will allow us to expand these program offerings in our existing chapters, and help us launch in 10 new cities in 2014. It will also provide funding to increase our staff in order to support our programs across the country.”
Second Place Winner ($20,000): Code.org
Mission: Code.org is dedicated to growing computer science education by making it available in more schools and increasing participation from women and underrepresented students of color.
What this grant means to your organization, by Roxanne Emadi:“Our goal is for every student in every school to have the opportunity to learn computer science. In one whirlwind year, our organization has gone from a team of one to a staff of dozens, and we're working hard to achieve our mission in three ways:
- Through advocacy, we're urging the now 35 out of 50 states that don't count computer science towards graduation requirements to change laws
- Through education, we're developing 20 hours of free introductory courses for students, and professional development for teachers
- And lastly, we aim to change the conversation around computer science with the Hour of Code, a massive campaign to recruit 10 million students to try computer science for one hour during Computer Science Education Week each December
While we've been humbled by support for our cause thus far, these are daunting goals, and support from AzureDev will help today's generation of young people think about computer science in a whole new way. No matter who they are, and what career path they may pursue, together we can help today's students not just consume technology, but to create the technology of the future and change the world.”
Third Place Winners ($10,000 each): CoderDojo, Teaching Kids Programming and CodeDay by StudentRND
Mission: CoderDojo is an open source, volunteer-led movement oriented around running free, not-for-profit coding clubs and sessions for young people. Since CoderDojo is open source, all Dojos are different and completely autonomous.
What this grant means to your organization, by Eugene McDonough: “Winning this competition allows us to embark on the development of a much needed project: CoderDojo platform. This single sign-on platform will help increase communication and collaboration between and within Dojos around the world.”
Mission: Teaching Kids Programming is a nonprofit organization of volunteer programmers and school teachers who have developed a framework designed specifically for teaching basic programming to children 10 and up. TKP is a designated project of the MONA Foundation.
What this grant means to your organization, by Lynn Langit:“Winning helps us to create more courseware and to train other teachers around the world. Our vision is to create a full first-year course which could be used to introduce every middle-school student in the world to programming.”
Mission: CodeDays are 24-hour events where high school and college students of all experience levels get together, make something cool, and become better programmers.
What this grant means to your organization, by Edward Jiang: “This grant allows us to continue to grow and engage passionate, motivated high school and college students to work on tech projects in their spare time.”
Thank you for your support! If you are passionate about changing the world through code, there is no better time to become an AzureDev. Sign up here to receive exclusive content drops from some of the top developers around the world as they share their stories on the hottest trends in programming and the impact they are having every day.