Students to showcase coding projects with city’s Department of General Services

Over the last several months, six Baltimore high school students learned to code in Python, and worked on projects for the city’s Department of General Services.
It was the initial pilot of a program resulting from a partnership between the city and Baltimore-based computer science education nonprofit Code in the Schools that’s aiming to provide a pathway to jobs.
The students will present their work during a showcase on Thursday, May 24, at Impact Hub Baltimore. The free event runs 6:30-8 p.m.

The first cohort of the @BaltimoreDGS + @CodeintheSchool partnership program is presenting their work next Thursday! Can't wait to see them show off what they've accomplished this semester! #STEMed https://t.co/2XgaHcvhxU

— Melanie Shimano (@melanieshimano) May 14, 2018

Through the program, the CITS Prodigy program students from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Archbishop Curley High School and Perry Hall High met after school three times a week to learn programming skills in Python with Code in the Schools. According to DGS Business Process Improvement Director Babila Lima, the students’ work on technology for the city into a pair of projects. They included a dashboard showing key performance indicators for mobile maintenance projects, and a Twitter bot to report on work completed by DGS’ facilities maintenance.
At the event on Thursday, students will present their work to a panel including DGS Director Steve Sharkey, Under Armour Senior VP of Global Information Technology TJ Graven, Fearless Solutions Partner and Program Manager John Foster, Linq Services COO Mallory Zimmerman, Baltimore City IT CTO Frank Johnson and Dr. Brian Coats, UMB Assistant VP of Technology Operations and Planning.
“It’s an opportunity for them to showcase what they’ve been working on,” Lima said, including what worked, challenges they encountered and overall takeaways.
One student will ultimately be hired for an internship at DGS. Along with getting experience making presentations and getting feedback, Lima said the idea of the event is to create a space for mentoring relationships to form for all of the participants.
“We’re hoping that this can also foster a connection between [the students] and other mentors,” Lima said.
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