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Now the Providence Public School District alum is concentrating in computer science and education studies at Brown. As a first-year student, Arrazola joined IgniteCS to help lead the coding club at Classical and teach computer science classes at Nathanael Greene Middle School, which he also attended. Arrazola hopes he can represent one potential path forward by returning to his former schools.

Part of what Im doing as a mentor is to show kids, Hey, Im someone from this community, and Im a Brown student, and you can study CS here too if thats something that you are interested in, Arrazola said.

The Robot Block Party offers Rhode Islanders a chance to learn about the robotic technologies being developed in the Ocean State.

Arrazola is among many eager computer science students, faculty and researchers committed to bringing creative learning experiences to local public schools. The coding classes and clubs cap a lengthy history of community outreach initiatives led by the Universitys computer science department. Brown faculty and students have taught the Hour of Code program in local schools since 2013, reaching more than 1,000 K-12 Providence and Central Falls students. Other outreach efforts in years prior have included a robot block party, a coding club for middle school girls and school field trips to Browns robotics lab.

Sophia Academy, a tuition-free independent middle school serving girls from low-income families in Providence, is among the newest schools to partner with IgniteCS. Guided by Brown undergraduates, seventh and eighth-grade students meet every Tuesday after school to create and design websites. Each week, the clubs lessons build on previous sessions to allow the middle schoolers to expand their technical skills and customize their sites with new pages, text, links and images.

Without a formal computer science curriculum, middle school director and math teacher Melissa Moniz sees partnerships with local institutions and community organizations as critical connections for introducing and exposing girls to cutting-edge science and technology. Other partners have included Black Girls CODE and Winners Circle XR Academy, an education nonprofit that creates immersive learning experiences using virtual reality. Moniz, a Providence native and Brown graduate, wants her students to understand that the University is accessible to them.

Its important that our students see a world outside of the classroom and connect to different organizations and community resources that are here in their community, Moniz said. Brown is right down the street from us, and often our students drive by. We want them to know that this is a school in your community that you can access and that the coding club is one way you can access it.

In its collaboration with the Brown student group, Nathanael Greene Middle School asked IgniteCS members to lead an in-school program, where teams of University students would guest-teach a full day of computer science classes. Leading two days of classes during the fall and spring, IgniteCS members instructed more than 200 middle school students each day on the uses of computer science in everyday life. And, while the middle school has expanded its STEAM curriculum in recent years to include coding, robotics and 3D printing, the guest teachers from Brown created lesson plans that supplemented the schools curriculum and focused on theoretical computer science topics, including algorithms and cryptography, among other topics.

For Darshell Silva, librarian and maker education teacher at Nathanael Greene, the Brown students are important real-life figures representing potential careers and pathways.

We like our students to see the real-world application of things that were teaching in the classroom as well as to see the people involved in it, Silva said. Theres no better way to show them that than to show them whats going on at Brown.

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To inspire local kids, Brown computer science students teach coding in Providence, Central Falls schools - Brown University