Coding is about more than just helping young people prepare themselves for jobs later in life. Students at MIT recently showed it can be used to save lives. Consider a recent article for NBC News titled “MIT Students Use Their Coding Skills For Suicide Prevention.”
Allison Tate of NBC News writes, “Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are using their coding skills for an important cause: lowering the suicide rate at their school. In the past decade, there have been 12 suicides among MIT graduate and undergraduate students, according to the Boston Globe. While the university has instituted its own initiatives to support mental health, three students took it upon themselves to go a step further. Through an anonymous texting hotline called Lean On Me, anyone in the MIT community in need of support can reach out at anytime and connect with a peer — which can be just as important as getting help from a professional, says MIT sophomore Andy Trattner, one of the hotline’s creators. Trattner’s mother died when he was 10 years old, and he and his sister were sent to a therapist to help them with their grief. But that wasn’t what Trattner needed, he said. ‘It was really ineffective for me, because I didn’t have anyone who was a peer to speak with,’ Trattner, 20, said. So last fall, when he and fellow MIT students Nikhil Buduma, 21, and Linda Jing, 20, came together at MIT’s annual HackMIT hackathon with the intent to build something that could help support students’ mental health, Trattner wanted to make sure it would provide that kind of authentic peer connection. ‘I wanted to find a way to create a safe space where students could get past the trivialities of ‘How are you? What classes are you taking?’ and really get to the core of each other,’ Trattner told NBC News.”
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Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise. Thus, the entire curriculum is customized. We are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, but we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.