Google Aims To Inspire Next Generation Of Coders

MIAMI, FL — When online giant Google sent a team to visit a Miami school this week one of the questions was downright hilarious.

"For a lot of students this is the first time they've met folks from Google, a website that they might interact with through the day," Googler Alex Sanchez recalled in an interview with Patch. "We got a question: Are you the person who answers the questions?"

Sanchez, who has been traveling around the country as part of Google’s national CS First Roadshow maintained his composure.

"It is like: 'No, I'm not that. It's definitely not me. I'm not that smart and that's not how it works,'" Sanchez said he responded to the student at McMillian Middle School in Miami on Monday. "There's a lot of questions about computer science, a lot of questions about 'like so what can I do with computer science?'"

That's exactly why Google has invested in such a program, to get kids interested in science, technology, engineering and math — not to mention the abundance of STEM jobs further down the road.

"Today, there are 500,000 computer science related jobs that go unfilled just because we don't have the folks that know about it. This is across different industries," Sanchez observed. "That number is expected actually to double in 2020 to one million. This is a space where's there definitely a high demand. For students, it's all jobs that pay well. People who study computer science make 40 percent more money than folks who don't."

Surprisingly, even Google can't fill all of its jobs.

"Today there's positions that we need to bring in talent to come and fill and we just don't have those folks," Sanchez said. "Our hope is to kind of in the future have these students get excited about computer science, see that this is something they can do, and hopefully today at the school we have some of our next engineers a few years down the road."

The CS First Roadshow landed at McMillian but also paid a visit to a Hollywood, Florida school and plans a similar event in Oldsmar not far from Tampa on Feb. 23.

The interactive lesson is meant to teach young children in grades four through six the basics of coding. U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who has been on a mission to attract more technology jobs to the Miami area, was on hand for Google's visit to McMillian, where some 60 kids attended.

Google’s CS First Roadshow has been to some 35 locations across the country since the program was hatched more than a year ago.

"The road show is essentially kind of a coding boot camp," explained Sanchez. "People, when they think of computer science, they think oh, you know somebody in a locked away room kind of writing code all day. But it's a lot more than that. We show examples of the fashion industry using coding to create dresses that light up according to their environment. We show instances of how you can design video games ... We also have an example where we show a high school student who has actually been using code for health reasons. She created an online database that actually analyzes breast tissue to determine breast cancer."

The Googlers introduce students to Scratch, a free computer programming language that shares the same fundamentals as other computer programming languages.

"They created interactive stories. They had to do adventure on the high seas," Sanchez said of Monday's event in Miami. "They code a wave. They code a boat. They code characters and then they code dialogue."

Sanchez, who graduated from Palmetto Senior High School — not to be confused with the school's other high-tech grad Jeff Bezos — said that he includes a never-fail slide if the the possibility of high-paying jobs does not immediately win over his young audiences.

"One of the examples we use is Pokémon GO," said Sanchez. "When that comes on the screen kids really get excited."

Google does not take requests from individual schools to put on a CS First Roadshow because there are simply too many schools to cover, about as limitless as the online search engine itself.

Instead, any school can download material directly from the CS First Roadshow website free or charge. Visit CS-first.com for more information.

"We want students to not just be consumers of technology, but really be creators," Sanchez stressed. "What we hope is really that students kind of walk away from this being a little bit inspired and saying 'Look I can see myself doing this and this actually aligns with things that I'm already kind of interested in.'"

Googler Alex Sanchez teaches McMillian School students
about coding. Photo courtesy Google.