Here’s what we learned this year

 

We Love ‘Aha’ moments!

Breaking down tech barriers, exploring possibilities, and opening doors to opportunity is our North Star, and in 2022, we look forward to identifying mission aligned partnerships to create even more career pathways and ‘aha’ moments for our learners.

If you can see it, you can be it!

Seeing yourself in tech and feeling like you belong are essential components to our curriculum and long-term persistence in tech learning pathways. We saw the biggest increase in belonging for girls and African American learners, who are among the most underrepresented in the tech industry. We believe that since our leadership and instructional team is 86% of people of color and 90% women, we are able to mirror the folks we serve and create programs that are relevant and identity affirming for our Black, Latinx, AAPI, and Indigenous learners. We remain committed to having more tech industry leaders that look like our Black, Brown and AAPI learners and are creating more ways of engagement with them throughout our programs in 2022. 

Recalibration for the Future!

 

Last year our attrition rate was 50%, which was on par with what our peer organizations experienced in virtual learning. We are a proactive team we recalibrated our offerings to solve for this in 2022.

  1. First thing we will do is shift the way we deliver our content, extending our classes from 8 weeks to 12 weeks to allow more time to absorb the material, contextualize, and identify the social justice relevancy. We shifted the in-class hours to only two days a week to allow more time for asynchronous learning using pre-recorded video content and tutorials.

  2. Secondly, we’ve incorporated pair programming sessions for community building for more peer-to-peer engagement to build community, camaraderie and find peers for support.

  3. Thirdly, we’re dedicating a Programs Assistant to help our instructors develop fun activities for our learners to engage with each other and build a sense of community beyond class content.

Holistic Support

As we saw from the Oakland public education fund and Intel program, stipends help increase learner persistence and reduce attrition. Because of this, we’ve decided to stipend all programs in 2022, paying $500 per learner per program if they successfully graduate. We’ve also shifted to have more focus on preparing learners for the job force (in terms of resume building, soft skills, persistence), as well as include more workshops and engagement from tech industry professionals.

Meeting learners where they are

We recognized the value and importance of meeting learners where they are. As a result, we’ve updated our application process in alignment with our expanded program offerings to provide better indicators about our learners’ prior programming and tech experience. By doing this, we can enable various entry points to our programs and to provide learners with the best support for them. In addition, we continue to make real-time, in class adjustments on our program content and strategy to ensure our learners can stay engaged and continue to develop their skills Our aim is to ensure a right-fit first learning experience with Hack the Hood and ensure learners a positive experience with STEM education and tech.