The KLE Foundation has awarded Youth Code Jam a four-year grant totaling $265,000 to expand Youth Code Jam’s teacher training through its “Jam in a Box” family and community engagement model for getting kids excited about computer science, building their confidence in their skills and inspiring them to imagine themselves in the tech-driven jobs of the future. The KLE grant will be used to train teachers in low opportunity schools in Texas Education Service Center Region 1 (Rio Grande Valley area) and Region 13 (Austin area).

Interested teachers, librarians and administrators can apply to be a part of the KLE Jam in a Box Cohort at bit.ly/wecanjam. Deadline to apply is September 30.

As part of its commitment to making computing accessible to all students, Youth Code Jam has pledged to design, build and implement bilingual, standards-aligned computer programming content designed to increase the confidence of elementary school teachers and librarians in introducing computational thinking and computer science in their schools. These activities have been built into a kit to prepare teachers to organize their own family engagement events using Youth Code Jam's impactful model.

The Jam in a Box kit has already been used to seed Community Code Jams in 37 schools in 21 Texas cities.