4 | MARCH 11 - 17, 2022 | WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
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Students learn STEM through app building to Minecraft at Code Wiz Monica Sager Special to Worcester Telegram & Gazette USA TODAY NETWORK
Cousins Avintha and Nihitha are hoping to build a mental health app to support their community, specifi cally driving the technology toward high school students and teenagers. The high schoolers, who are a part of the technologically-focused Code Wiz of Westborough, realized that with the stress of the pandemic in addition to their own mental illnesses – there is a need for such support. “They decided they want to help their community because they did a lot of research and found there’s not any mental health apps specifi cally targeted to teenagers,” Code Wiz Director Madison Ducote said. “They’re normally for everybody or targeted to adults.” Avintha and Nihitha will present their creations and work through Code Wiz at Technovation Girls, a competition for girls around the world to learn and apply technology to real-world situations. while one is working remotely from Texas, Code Wiz, which has locations across Massachusetts and in New Jersey, allows children to expand on their interests in robotics, technology, game development, and programming through classes. “I’m just so happy with these two very, very smart, driven high school students,” Ducote said. “We meet with them twice
One Code Wiz student made a robot that can identify Pokémon cards.
The Westborough branch of Code Wiz encourages students to strengthen their team building and problem solving skills. SUBMITTED PHOTOS
a week. They’re so driven and they want to help their community, and I love that they’re taking these themes and concepts and helping out the community.” The Westborough branch of Code Wiz, which opened right before the onset of the pandemic, encourages all of its students to strengthen their team building and problem solving skills as they work both collectively and individually on projects. “One of our students made a PokeDeck,” Ducote said. “He made a robot that when you put a picture in a slot, it could identify what Pokemon it was and
give a description of it.” Students complete projects in hopes that their work may later lead to world-changing technologies. Coaches are trained for the specifi c courses they teach. “A lot of times they get to come in and they say what they want to do today,” Ducote said. “The coach fi gures out how to let the student dictate the class even though the coach is still having them hit those curriculum points.” Ducote added that the skills the students are inevitably learning are transferable into other fi elds and areas within the kids’ lives.
The Westborough Code Wiz branch plans to compete in more robotics competitions, specifi cally the First LEGO League, a competition meant to introduce the STEM fi eld to kids between the ages of 4 and 16 through hands-on real world problem-solving experiences. Four students recently competed at the organization’s fi rst excursion to First LEGO League. They worked together for four months to build a robot that would go through obstacles. Ducote said they also had to present a project. “It was a lot of fun,” Ducote said. “We’ll be doing that every year … We’d love to enter as
many competitions as we could. It’s so fun to see the students so motivated and see them excel in the competitions.” Students become so engaged and immersed in the programs. Some, such as Ari Johnson have gone on to now become coaches for other students. Johnson originally started as a student at Code Wiz in 2018. He joined the branch in Westford, where he is from, to expand on his passion for gaming. “I wanted to make video games,” Johnson said. “I started to learn Java and then Unity, which is like a big gaming software.” See CODE WIZ, Page 6D
