NewBoCo blog

Looking at the numbers, coding is still an industry dominated by men.
With Girls Who Code, NewBoCo looked to even the playing field. In 2023, NewBoCo had over 50 local students between 3rd and 12th grade in our Girls Who Code clubs. Taking place every Saturday for 10 weeks in the spring and again in the fall, Girls Who Code focuses on coding, learning about career opportunities, building positive relationships with peers, and doing projects throughout.

Four years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Foster believes Vault has fully bounced back to being the vibrant community that it was before 2020. 

“During the pandemic, Vault was empty,” he says. “But then slowly and surely, we started getting those people who want to try it out, just like back when we started in 2015. And they’re saying ‘Hey, this works for me.’ Today we’ve got a good collection of people, and it’s a great community again.”

For nearly a decade, NewBoCo has been offering programs for all ages within our building. Now we’re making more of an effort to bring those programs out into the community, too.

Jess Faber is a Prometheus Award winner. She’s taught at DeltaV Code School. She’s a founding member of NewBoCo. And she’s currently building all kinds of apps as a UI/UX Developer for NewBoCo Studios. You can see examples of her work that will blow you away. So when we tell you that she’s giving a free talk about what she does next Tuesday, you can bet it’s worth hearing.

We know Iowa needs more computer science teachers for every child to have the opportunity to learn future ready skills.

Thanks to NewBoCo’s Code.org Partnership, you can train your existing teachers who want to begin teaching computer science here instead of finding and hiring a new teacher.

Last weekend, the  regional level of the national Future Cities competition was held at Maple Grove Elementary School in Cedar Rapids. More than 30 teams of middle school students from across the state competed. 

Every year, there’s a theme for students to build around. This year it was “electrify your future,” with teams challenged to create their cities specifically with renewable energy in mind.