CEDAR FALLS — Kunyu Du was in seventh grade when she discovered computer science didn’t have to be an intimidating subject.
Her expanded learning program teacher at Holmes Junior High School introduced students to “a really interesting website” called Repl.it. She learned how to “plug in some symbols or words and an app came out.”
“I shared it with everyone in my family and it was so cool to me,” said Du, known by most people as Kimi.
Fast forward four years and the 16-year-old Cedar Falls High School junior is leading a computer coding camp for girls who are at the age when she was first exposed to it.
The virtual camp, called SparkIT – Cedar Falls, includes 11 fifth- to eighth-grade girls who are students in the Cedar Falls Community Schools. It was made possible through a $3,000 grant that Du received from the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s AspireIT program.
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“We all meet together on Zoom and, basically, what the agenda looks like is we follow the code.org curriculum and we also do our own project,” said Du, such as designing computer games.
She is helping the girls to learn block-based coding and the Python programming language. They’ve been gathering online daily since Nov. 25, for 45 minutes on weekday evenings and 1-1/4 hours on weekend afternoons. The camp wraps up Monday.
“I’m really, really grateful,” said Du. “Because it’s an opportunity to, like, pass it on and help the community.”
The possibility of organizing a camp came after Du won an award earlier this year for “Aspiration in Computing” from NCWIT’s Iowa affiliate. It honors high school girls for their computer-related achievements and interests.
As the state winner, Du qualified to apply for the grant. Swetha Prabakaran, who founded the nonprofit Everybody Code Now, served as her program adviser and helped with the application.
“She gave a lot of great advice on how to recruit people,” said Du, as well as advising her on how to design the camp.
After whetting her appetite for coding in seventh grade, Du took computer science essentials in ninth grade, a class that was in its second year of being offered at the high school. She continued on in 10th grade to an Advanced Placement computer science principles class.
“It really opened my eyes to this whole other career and opportunities, and that’s why I kind of want to pass the torch,” she explained, about the first class. She hopes to “inspire some of the (camp) participants to take more computer science classes or even to go into the career if they like it.”
Briana Goodenbour taught that first computer science class and nominated Du for the award. The teacher is “not surprised that she was willing to apply for the grant and spread the knowledge.”
“We are working on growing our computer science class,” said Goodenbour, including outreach to girls. She noted that Du “was always willing to help classmates” who didn’t understand something or got stuck while doing an assignment. “That really lends to her personality.”
Du “just did really well” with the first class, said Goodenbour. In nominating her, “I kind of wanted to celebrate that with her.”