By

by Genetta M. Adams

The Root

While the tech industry continued to try to figure out what to do about its diversity problem, 50 high school and college students of color were getting a taste of what it might be like to work in Silicon Valley at MVMT50’s inaugural hackathon, held over the weekend at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas.

Organizations like MVMT50 have been looking at ways to address the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, where blacks make up about 2 percent of the workforce. The diversity hackathon is one way to expose young people to opportunities they might not even be aware of, said Autumn Caviness, who organized the hackathon and is assistant director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Honors Program at HT.

For those unfamiliar with a hackathon, it’s a competition that brings together coders, software designers and innovative thinkers to conceive and create Web- or mobile-based applications. For the diversity hackathon, students had to create mobile apps that would tackle real-world problems in three key areas: justice, health and education.

On Saturday the students were broken into teams and assigned a mentor and began working out ideas. Many of their ideas spoke directly to the challenges they face every day. One team suggested an educational game that would use different scenarios to teach students how to respond to racial conflicts. Another group proposed an app called Discreet, a sexual-history diary where users could log their sexual activity and keep track of their sex partners.

For two days students huddled over computers, drew sketches and gathered data. By Sunday evening the nine teams were ready to present a demo of their apps to five judges at a reception featuring family and friends.

The app that took first place, called Pipeline, sought to address the school-to-prison pipeline, which has had a staggering effect on black and Hispanic boys. The app would motivate students to stay in school by calculating their expected financial gains and improved life span, since those with higher educations tend to live longer and earn better salaries.

Caviness said that although most of the students weren’t necessarily studying math or science, it was important that they got a chance to network with the local tech professionals—many of them people of color—who volunteered to work as mentors for the two-day event.

“I want them to leave with connections,” said Caviness. “To me, it was about moving beyond what we consider a traditional hackathon and really being able to think about, how do you create and build social capital?”

Networking was the primary reason that 18-year-old Jaylin Turner, a communications major at HT, decided to participate in the hackathon. “I understood that we were going to be able to present at the end of the camp, and so I wanted to have an opportunity to showcase my abilities to show that I am a good communicator,” said Turner.

Her team’s app, called Right Track, was designed to help low-income families develop healthy eating plans by calculating the cost of healthier food options based on a family’s budget.

The creativity of communities of color is an untapped resource and something the tech industry needs to recognize, said Caviness—especially when you consider that young African Americans and Hispanics are the driving force behind the tech industry’s most popular social media tools.

“It’s absolutely absurd to me that African Americans and Latinos lead social media but those numbers are not reflected in Silicon Valley, on the boards of Silicon Valley or in the tech industry,” said Caviness. “And yet we make that media happen. We power Twitter, we power Instagram and we power Snapchat.”

NOTE: The hackathon even was part of the 2015 SXSW Music, Film, and Interactive Festival taking place March 13th – 22nd in Austin Texas.

(Genetta M. Adams is a senior editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter.)

By PRNewswire-USNewswire

(PRNewswire-USNewswire) – The goal: provide research on how low- to middle-income urban African American and Hispanic teens, as well as parents, regard information technology (IT) jobs, college and future careers.

The findings: Three types of jobs in information technology – software programmer, computer technician and computer design engineer – ranked in the top ten of teens’ career interests from among 60 career categories, from business and law to music and sports. The teens surveyed also believed that with hard work and/or innate talent, they could be successful in IT careers.

This and more is included in Survey of Teen Views on Tech Careers. The survey is the work of IT Futures Labs, a signature initiative of the Creating IT Futures Foundation.

The new research is offered to help parents and educators understand how to inform and motivate youth to choose a path toward well-paying tech careers.

“Constrained by limited resources, schools and after-school programs in urban areas often focus attention on the kids at risk of dropping out of high school or the high academic achievers who are on a four-year college path. The academically average students are often left to find their own way. Our research study looks at these kids in the middle, whom we know can achieve solid career success in the practical, hands-on world of IT given the right motivation and opportunities,” said Charles Eaton, CEO, Creating IT Futures Foundation.

“We found that urban minority teens have a strong affinity for technology and a desire to work directly with technology in a career.”

The surveyed teens were all B and C students in good standing in their junior or senior year of high school. The teens overwhelmingly indicated college was a high priority and that they wanted to feel connected to a career – not just punch a clock. “Having a job I love” was ranked number one by teens in terms of goals to accomplish over the next decade.

Altruistic aspirations such as contributing money or housing to parents or “helping other people” tended to rank just as high as or even higher with the teens than, “having a lot of money,” “owning my own home,” or “moving into a better neighborhood.” Motivational career messaging targeted at urban minority teens may miss this altruism angle.

IT career myths

In terms of advice on college and careers, teens reportedly rely on parents 2-to-1 over any other source, according to the survey. But myths about the necessity of four-year degrees and needing to be a whiz in math and science still persist in the minds of teens and parents alike.

“Parents should recognize and capitalize on their strong influence with their teenagers,” said Eric Larson, director, IT Futures Labs, Creating IT Futures Foundation.

“Don’t assume that your messages about college and careers are getting through. Parents intentionally need to set aside more time to discuss careers with their kids. They also need to learn more about tech careers and spot the myths that get in the way of their students becoming technologists.”

The Creating IT Futures Foundation, CompTIA and other IT organizations have long maintained that a four-year degree, while potentially beneficial in the long run, is not the only way to get started in an IT career. A student also doesn’t have to be a top achiever in math and science to be successful in IT.

Instead, Creating IT Futures recommends that teens and parents explore IT training options at two-year-degree institutions and non-profit training programs as well as on-the-job training opportunities with local employers. Teens also should become familiar with IT certifications offered by CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft and other certifying bodies.

Based on the survey results, Creating IT Futures recommends that educators and school counselors:

Rethink their marketing of tech careers to teens.
Develop and promote hands-on tech programs.
Help parents provide career guidance.
Clarify what IT means so that teens understand the diverse options available in technology.

Methodology

Creating IT Futures conducted qualitative, ethnographic research in 2013 among a limited number of Chicago area teens and parents. That ethnographic research helped inform the questions for a follow-up 2014 quantitative national survey of more than 300 eleventh- and twelfth-graders and an equivalent number of adults who parent at least one eleventh- or twelfth-grader.

The full survey is available at http://www.creatingitfutures.org/download-teen-whitepaper.

By by Jamaal Abdul-Alim NNPA News Service

Back in the days when an African-American child ran afoul of his or her parents or elders, the child might be asked to go retrieve a “switch” – a thin branch from a tree or a bush – in order for the adult disciplinarian to use to beat the child as punishment for a particular infraction.

“That’s some hell of a psychology, right, to make you go get a switch to beat your own ass with, right?” the legendary comic Richard Pryor observed once in his famous 1979 “Live in Concert.”

These days, the “switch” may be largely a thing of the past, but it’s been replaced by a new form of punishment that is just as unnerving – if not more – than being asked to retrieve a tree branch that one knows will be used to inflict pain on one’s own hide. Instead of asking misbehaving children to retrieve a switch, a small but growing number of African-American parents are retrieving video cameras in order to record themselves whipping their children, then posting videos of the whippings on social media websites, such as Facebook, to embarrass their children to get them to discontinue any non-desirous behavior.

In the cases of boys, the parents were often upset over their sons’ involvement in gangs or similar criminal activity. In the cases of girls, the parents were typically upset over their daughters being sexually promiscuous or representing themselves as being older than they actually were. Consider, for instance, the titles of the following videos, which can be found easily online:

“Father Slaps His Son For Trying To Be In A Gang ‘My Son Will Not Be In A Gang Who Ever Has A Problem Come See Me!’”
“Mama Don’t Play: Mother Whoops Her Daughter For Being A Thot!” (A “thot” is a contemporary slang term for a promiscuous girl.)
“Father Whoops On His 13-Year-Old Daughter Dressed Like Beyonce After Going Missing For 3 Days!”
“Father Gives His Nephew An Old School Azz Whoopin On Webcam For Acting Hard On Facebook”

The practice of posting videos of child beatings online is so disquieting for some African-American scholars that some declined to comment for this article. And those who did speak did so hesitantly out of concern that highlighting cases in which African-American children were purposefully beaten on camera might perpetuate false notions that African-American parents are more violent than parents of other ethnicities when it comes to the disciplining of their children.

That’s a valid concern when you consider the fact that these videos – often just a few minutes or less – are generating millions of views online and thus saturating large segments of American society. All of the African-American scholars contacted for this article condemned the practice of combining corporal punishment and social media as counterproductive. They also urged African-American parents to try to find alternative means of disciplining their children.

“I oppose the practice,” said Dorothy E. Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think they’re humiliating their children and I don’t think it’s going to help,” Roberts said. “If anything it’s going to make the children resentful. I think that humiliating children can be as painful as the physical harm.”

Carletta N. Perry, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Saint Leo University, said putting discipline methods on social media can increase negative attention-seeking behavior.

“This is the opposite of what parents want,” Perry said. “They want their children to stop whatever negative behavior they are involved in, but sharing the discipline on social media is not the way. … Embarrassment may be one of the goals to stop the behavior, but, in fact, this type of behavior is an embarrassment to the family, the culture, and society.”

It’s also legally perilous.

In several cases parents were arrested for the beatings that were captured on videos and posted online. Both Roberts and Perry suggested that the practice of putting child beatings online appears to be indicative of parental frustration. They sought to make it clear that they did not want to bash the parents. They also sought to broaden the context in which the videotaped beatings took place.

“I don’t just condemn these parents,” Roberts said. “I also condemn the situations that they and their children find themselves in.”

“As a psychologist, I have worked with parents who struggle to keep their children out of dangerous situations and in line on a day-to-day basis due to outside influences,” Perry said.

“Unfortunately, I have also seen parents cry out for help to the police, to the courts, and to the community but many times their cry is unheard, unanswered and they feel alone in parenting during difficult situations.”

One important thing to understand about some of the cases in which African-American parents beat their children and then post videos of the beating online is that some of the children’s misbehavior was perpetrated online. You might think of it as parents going to the playground where they were misbehaving and beating their children in public – only now the “playground” is the Internet.

Girls, for instance, may have been caught flirting with boys or older men online, and so their parents meted out the punishment in the same venue. Boys, on the other hand, may have bragged about gang involvement on their Facebook pages, and so their fathers or uncles post videos online of them beating the boys and forcing them to renounce their gang ties publicly.

Roberts questioned the premise of whether the practice of parents putting child beatings online is actually confined to African-American parents and urged a reporter to search for cases in which parents of other ethnicities had done the same thing. While it’s difficult to collect and assess all cases of videotaped child beatings, a recent unscientific web search turned up one apparent distinction between cases of white parents and African-American parents where videos surfaced of them beating their children online.

That is, in several cases where white parents had been videotaped beating their children, the video recordings were unintentional or surreptitious. That is to say, the white parents had simply been caught beating their children on video. African-American parents, on the other hand, had put the videotaped beatings online on purpose. And sometimes they defiantly expressed blatant disregard for the legal repercussions or ramifications of doing so.

For instance, a Flint, Mich. mother who – along with her mother – made a video of them beating her 11-year-old son for claiming to be a “gangster” and not doing his school work actually looked into the videocamera and defiantly and daringly said: “Please call CPS (child protective services) if you want to. Watch this ass-whooping this ‘gangster’ gonna get.” The boy is made to apologize to his mother, asked about his grades in school and made to tell the people on Facebook: “it’s not cool to be a gangster.”

Illustrating how corporal punishment has been a longstanding institution within the family, the boy’s grandmother tells the boy she would “do just like my mama …. Walk and then come back and whoop your ass some more if I feel like it, you understand?”

Perry – without speaking directly to the aforementioned case – said it’s important to “speak life into your children and tell them who they are, where they come from and where they are capable of going in their bright future.”

“And, always speak with love in your heart and never in angry moments,” Perry said.

“Remember to pause before you speak because your actions and your words are the lessons they will remember.”

(Special to the NNPA from the San Diego Voice & Viewpoint.)

By by Phreddy Wischusen NNPA News Service

Anyone who spends time with young children knows they have a love and an affinity for our devices — smartphones, tablets and computers. Long before most children learn to read, they know how to identify the appropriate charger for each device how to open apps, and so on.

Detroit native Dara Harper, author, playwright, and mom, has added app developer under her belt. The innovative Harper has merged her skill as a story teller with the creation of a new application. “Pretty like Me 1,” is the story of Nia, a young African American girl who learns to love her natural hair, and in turn herself. But “Pretty like Me,” is not a traditional storybook, it’s an app.

The app has three different modes: The most advanced children can read the story to themselves, parents can read the story to their children, and children can opt to have the app read aloud to them, similar to audiobooks. The story/text is accompanied by Harper’s whimsical animations/illustrations and gives children opportunities to interact with it, transforming caterpillars into butterflies and making the stars twinkle.

“I’m a storyteller, so whether it’s writing plays or writing books or developing storybook apps I like to tell stories,” says Harper. “(Developing apps) … is away for me to tell stories in a different medium. And I find a lot of value in that.”

For Harper, however, simply telling stories is not enough. She strives to use her stories to uplift and educate her audience in the long tradition of African griots, and for her craft to provide for her and her family financially.

Harper created Nia, whose name means purpose in Kiswahili, to inoculate children to the negative affects of growing up in world where there is so much pressure to look other than how they do naturally.

“I wanted to put the app highlighting natural hair, because I wanted her to celebrate her pride and what makes her beautiful, and sometimes even in the African American community there can be pressure on Black women (to) conform and wear (their) hair a certain way, that (they) should straighten it,” she says.

Rising rates of male anorexia indicate to the author that this pressure is growing in all segments of our society.

“When you’re watching television or you’re online all day and tuned to certain images and they’re flashing in front of your face constantly (and think to yourself) ‘I don’t look like that…’ and yet those people don’t even look like that,” Harper observes. “…I’ve been around celebrities up close and personal, and I can tell you: Flawless skin doesn’t exist like you think it does … There is such a thing as Photoshop … and I think that can send the wrong message to a lot of young men and women.”

When appearance anxiety is eased, Harper believes, people are freed up to focus their energy on other things, and with added self-confidence comes an enhanced ability to manifest their ambitions. Harper is living proof.

Many consider the arts and sciences to be opposites, but Harper, an award-winning playwright and filmmaker, taught herself how to code in order to produce her series of apps. The work was extremely challenging at first, she says, and required a lot of math, “but a very different kind of math than we were taught in high school.”

According to Harper, high school math teaches you how to solve a problem to find a single solution, but coding is like engineering, one starts with a desired solution and finds any of an infinity of ways to achieve it. “Everyone’s code looks different just like them,” Harper says. “Johnny’s code looks crazy because he’s crazy. Sally’s code is neat and organized because that’s her style. Brother Deon‘s code is cool and smooth, just like him.” But, she says, it all works.

The value in code diversity, says Harper, “is that you see there are so many different ways to arrive at the answer. Before you arrive at the answer, you define the question yourself.” By learning to code, Harper doesn’t have to pay someone to develop her apps and can make her art practice and her life financially sustainable.

“In order to be successful today a person has to have several avenues of how they can support themselves financially. It’s not even just the money you make, it’s how they earn that money.”

Harper says she would rather make $10,000 from 10 sources rather than 20,000 a month from one source.

“If all of your money is coming from one source, if something changes or something goes bad — whether it’s a pink slip or even if you’re a business owner and the climate changes — and all of a sudden your $20,000 a month shrinks to $3,000 and you don’t have anything else going for you, then that’s painful. But think about the person who makes a total of $10,000 a month from 10 different income sources. If one of those sources is compromised in some form or fashion… you still have $9,000 from the others. And while you still have those going, you have time to retool and figure out how to fi ll in the missing blank there.”

Harper works exclusively as an artist, building multiple revenue streams from sales of her novels, app sales and other media products. The confidence to become an artist/entrepreneur is what she has written into Nia’s story, so young girls and boys can grow up to make their own individual passions the way they sustain their lives.

A mother of a young child, Harper has branded her children’s line, Sea Shell Kids, because “I remember when I went to the beach as a child and I saw how different all the sea shells were. All sea shells are unique. I think each child is unique. I celebrate that uniqueness.”

(Dara Harper’s books and applications for children are available at www.seashellkids.com and her novels for adults can be found at www.darawrites.com.)

(Special to the NNPA from The Michigan Citizen.)