Our mission
Bootstrap is a curriculum for middle-school students. It teaches them
programming through the media of images and animations. It consists
of nine 90-minute lessons, delivered once a week in an after-school
setting, with accompanying handouts and software.
Our primary delivery network is
Citizen Schools,
who make it easy for community professionals to teach
after-school classes as volunteers.
Our students
Bootstrap has already engaged nearly 300 middle-schoolers, of whom 24%
are female; 40% of those reporting race are African-American and
another 30% Latino; and 70% receive free or reduced price lunch. These
students have an average age of 11 years, 9 months. They are in
Boston and its surroundings, Austin, the Bay Area (San Francisco, San
Jose, and Redwood City), and New York City.
Our algebra connection
Unlike many other middle-school programs, Bootstrap uses
algebra as the vehicle for creating images and animations.
This is not just algebra over numbers, of course, but over a much
richer set of data types, such as images. We're not out to provide a
booster shot of algebra to older students; we plan to be the
first dose of formal algebra, for students as young as eleven.