Earlier this year, AzCASE and Cox Communications awarded a 2021 STEM Grant to the Tynkertopia in Flagstaff to help them launch a Coding Mentorship Program.

"Tynkertopia’s Coding Mentorship Program connected high school students with elementary school students to focus on expanding creativity and inquiry skills through coding. Our participants were students living in Flagstaff neighborhoods with high ethnic and racial diversity and high poverty rates. Each mentor-mentee team met an average of 20 hours over a 4 to 12-week period under the guidance of a Tynkertopia staff member. Some participant teams met virtually, and others met face-to-face.

In addition to actual coding, participants engaged in activities designed to develop a tynkering mindset, thus encouraging them to play with their own ideas, try different approaches, contemplate what to do next, trust their intuition, and learn from their mistakes. We used the Code.org computer science curriculum during initial sessions, but soon discovered students to be more engaged when using Scratch block coding. Each student mentor had a 30- to 60-minute Zoom meeting with adult mentors working as practicing engineers form WL Gore Flagstaff.

Funds from the Arizona Center for Afterschool Excellence were used to purchase 10 Chromebooks for the elementary school mentees. We chose to purchase fewer, more expensive devises rather than less expensive tablets, as Chromebooks provided more options and more versatility than did tablets."

When junior high teacher Nancy Parra-Quinlan plans lessons for her students, she’s not just looking for them to hit content knowledge benchmarks. She’s also looking for the twinkle, the spark, the glimmer that shows they’ve not only understood a topic, but are excited by it.

For her flight and space class where students build and launch rockets, that’s the moment they take off. “Just watching their faces, the excitement — your eyes are glued to it,” Parra-Quinlan said. Parra-Quinlan teaches objectively interesting subjects: engineering, robotics, flight and space and even a medical detectives course. But that isn’t what makes Parra-Quinlan, who was named the 2022 Arizona Teacher of the Year this fall, an excellent educator.

From creating captivating lessons to building real and lasting relationships with the students at Kino Junior High School in Mesa Public Schools as both a teacher and club mentor, Parra-Quinlan’s approach to teaching is part of a long-term effort to help more women and students of color enter the STEM field.

The digitized and online world we now live in has revolutionized how we work, seek entertainment, stay informed and connect with each other. Unfortunately, it has also revolutionized how cyber criminals can target us!

Whether temporarily shutting down a major oil pipeline or stealing patient data from hospitals, cyber threats have become a globally significant issue. Due to this growing threat, cybersecurity stands out as one of the world’s fastest-growing sectors, creating a globally widening skills gap that the industry is desperate to fill.

That's where CyberStart America comes in. As part of the National Cyber Scholarship Foundation’s wider initiative, CyberStart America (CSA) is a free national program helping to close the cybersecurity skills gap in the United States.

CSA aims to inspire every high school student in the US to give cybersecurity a try. By providing free access to an immersive, gamified learning platform, CSA motivates high school students to explore the exciting opportunities cybersecurity has to offer.