By Daniel Stoller
At Bootstrap afterschool sessions, Northeastern students teach local middle schoolers with unlikely tools: videogames.
“What these kids are doing is serious stuff,” said Jennifer Wong, a senior development officer for Northeastern’s College of Computer Information and Science (CCIS).
“When you see 10 and 11 year-olds making video games and talking about X and Y [coordinates], it’s a great experience,” she said.
Wong’s job is to oversee the long-term sustainability of Bootstrap, a new educational initiative to introduce students at some schools in Boston to computer programming.
Videogames are just part of the project.
Bootstrap takes some cues from Teach Scheme!, a national computer programming initiative founded by Northeastern professor Matthias Felleisen, and teams up student volunteers with local kids to conquer complicated subjects with creativity.
Adapted from Teach Scheme! by Northeastern Program Director Emmanuel Schanzer, the program offers a 10-week afterschool activity group, which meets once a week for a couple of hours; and a weeklong, eight-hour summer camp, with open enrollment for middle and high school students in Boston.
The afterschool program, aimed at sixth, seventh and eighth graders, runs in conjunction with Citizen Schools, a nonprofit organization providing programming for Boston’s middle schoolers.
The program began its experimental phase late last school year, and recently received a $150,000 grant from Microsoft. Administrators plan to use the money to expand its reach beyond the Boston area, Wong said.
“Right now, we are in seven sites in the Boston area,” Wong said. “We are looking to roll out to Texas and California, based on where there are Citizen Schools.”
After each session, the students present what they’ve made, like videogames – the culmination of their computer programming and math learning.
Computer science students proficient in Scheme, the programming language Bootstrap pupils use to create their videogames, are eligible to tutor.
The curriculum is designed to get middle school students excited about using programming tools, said Allison Cox, a liaison between Citizen Schools and Northeastern. It gives them early experience with high school math concepts like functions.
Whether this translates into better academic performance remains to be seen. “It’s hard to see an improvement in grades in just a semester’s time,” Cox said. Student volunteers at Northeastern have taken positively to the program, said Cox, who added that recruitment has been a success.
“It’s a great a way to get Northeastern students to places like Mattapan and Dorchester,” she said.
Community response to the program has also been positive, said Citizen Schools Volunteer Coordinator Claudia Alfaro.
“Parents are excited that their own children are building these videogames and that students have been exposed to Northeastern students,” Alfaro said.
Jake Rozin, a sophomore computer science and journalism major, first heard of the program his freshman year when a professor offered his class the opportunity to teach programming material to middle school students.
Rozin has taught two classes, including one last fall at the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science in Roxbury.
“[Benefits of teaching include] understanding the material more,” Rozin said.
Although at times frustrating, the program is worthwhile, Rozin said.
“Sometimes you feel like you’re talking to [the pupils] and you don’t think they’re getting it,” he said. “But once you see them doing things on their own, it’s pretty rewarding.”
Coming into the program, Rozin said he had some trepidation about working with younger children.
But his fear, he said, ultimately proved unfounded.
“This summer, one of our brightest students was in seventh grade,” he said. “If you treat the material and kids like a college student, you give them the information, they get it surprisingly well.”
