Don’t Know Much About: The Coding Space Scholarship Program

From schools moving to remote or hybrid learning environments to families losing jobs and income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been a year full of challenges.

Here at The Coding Space, we’re committed to offering support to families and students in need through our scholarship program.

With the season of giving just around the corner, we wanted to take a moment and highlight how the scholarship program has contributed to continuing the coding education of students during an especially trying year, as well as to provide information about the program and invite qualifying students to apply. We spoke with Ofelia Canals, Head of Admissions and Client Relations, about this important initiative.

Thanks for speaking with us, Ofelia. Can you give us a little background on the program?

While we received our first application in June 2016, the scholarship program has been a central piece of our mission since the beginning. Over the last year and a half, we’ve focused on formalizing and expanding the initiative. As of 2020, we have awarded over 300 need-based scholarships to our after-school classes and summer camps.

It sounds like this is a central piece of the TCS ethos. Can you expand on that?

Absolutely. We view our scholarship program as an essential part of our mission to create a more equitable and inclusive computer science industry. We are passionate about providing the opportunity for all students to become digitally literate and to foster critical thinking skills. To that end, we aim for 25 percent of our student population to receive a full or partial scholarship.

We know this year especially has brought increased hardship to many of our families and we are committed to continuing to provide a space for current and new students to learn and grow.

What makes the TCS scholarship program unique from other programs like it?

Our process is very simple and straightforward. We don’t require long application answers or multiple forms and simply aim to provide access to as many students as we can. Parents simply submit answers to a short questionnaire which our team then reviews. If your application is approved and a scholarship spot opens up, we will reach out directly.

Looking ahead, what’s next for the scholarship program?

As we grow and our students enter high school, we hope to be able to continue to support them in their journeys as coders. We also aim to create opportunities for our scholarship students to join our staff as teachers and help inspire future generations of coders.

Finally, because our aim is to support students from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, we acknowledge that this program will require continued assessment, especially through the lens of racial equity. We are currently in this process and look forward to the continued work of incorporating racial equity into our approach.

Full details as well as application information can be found here. For questions about the scholarship program, please contact Ofelia directly at ofelia@thecodingspace.com.