At the OpenGov Hack Night on June 3rd, Englewood Codes and North Central College presented their work on an integrated developer environment for Englewood students to use during their program.
Englewood Codes is a project of Teamwork Englewood that works with high school students in Englewood to teach them web developer skills. This is the second summer of the program. For this summer, Teamwork Englewood has selected some of the top students from last year and is working with them to take a deeper dive into web development.
One of the challenges with teaching web development is getting the computers ready for web development. Every computer needs to have GitHub installed, Ruby on Rails downloaded, and other system configurations. It’s not always easy and it can be a logistical challenge to try and set the configurations on public computers.
To help solve this, Teamwork Englewood partnered with North Central College to build an integrated development environment. The integrated development environment was built by students participating in a CSC495 Capstone class at North Center College. An integrated development environment (IDE), is an application developers used to build software. Often, IDEs will include a source code editor, debugger, and a set of tools that make developing software easier.
Here’s Michael, a student at North Center College, explaining the project.
*video*
For the Englewood Codes IDE, the team built an environment that integrates directly with GitHub. Users use their GitHub login to sign in and the app displays a toolbar for interacting with the open source software site. The entire IDE is open sourced on GitHub so that it can be used by other education groups.
For Englewood Codes, it’s more than just about making it easy to code. The IDE will enable their students to develop programs directly from their browser no matter which computer they’re on. This means their students can practice at home or at another location. As part of the program, Englewood Codes will be visiting tech companies around the city including the Data Science for Social Good fellowship. After the summer, Englewood Codes will be working with CPS to bring the Englewood Codes IDE into classrooms all over the city.
To learn more about Englewood Codes, please visit the Teamwork Englewood website.
