In advance of the 2015 National Coalition of Girls Conference in Richmond, Virginia, Level Up Village (LUV) will add Vidcode to its line-up of Global STEAM (STEM + arts) enrichment courses.

Designed with girls in mind, Vidcode is a new app that allows users to jump right in and create special effects for their own Instagram videos using JavaScript. For every student in the United States that signs up to take the course, Level Up Village will donate the same course to the student’s individual partner in a developing country and Vidcode will donate the partner student’s license fee. 

“Vidcode is a highly engaging course that inspires a love of coding, even among students who may not view themselves as technologically savvy. We’re thrilled to add it to our roster of innovative global STEAM courses,” said Amy McCooe, Co-Founder, Level Up Village. 

"In the course, students will collaborate one-one-one with their individual Global Partner to create an advocacy video while learning JavaScript," said Neesha Rahim, Co-Founder Level Up Village.  "We know that the secret to getting girls interested in STEAM is to give them the opportunity to apply their skills to real-life problems and look forward to seeing not only how far our U.S. and global students get in terms of coding, but also the videos they create together.”

In Vidcode, students will tell their own digital stories using video and coding, plus they will learn to apply special effects to projects such as music videos and stop motion animations. By the end, they will have completed an “Intro to JavaScript” course and created a social awareness video with their individual global partner. Vidcode recently won the “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Most Innovative” awards at SIIA’s 2015 Innovation Incubator program. 

“We are delighted to team up with Level Up Village to bring Vidcode to even more girls in the U.S. and across the globe,” said Alexandra Diracles, Co-founder Vidcode. “Girls told us they want to start creating right away and they want it to do it with their friends. Vidcode allows them to do just that -- they learn to leverage JavaScript and the newest web technologies to manipulate their own videos in a number of exciting ways.”

Level Up Village provides teachers with fully developed curricula, comprehensive teacher training and experienced management of the global collaboration process. LUV’s U.S. school partners directly sponsor Global STEAM education in developing countries through the give one, get one classroom model: a portion of the tuition is used to deliver the same class to students at one of LUV’s Global Partner schools, many of whom are living on less than $2 a day.

It’s been a longstanding effort by many schools and technology companies to get girls excited about STEM geared learning. In the past younger girls have not always shared an interest in theses concentrations and this use of Vidcode adds to the push in making sure girls are offered the same opportunities in these fields.

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Release posted by Navindra Persaud, Education World Contributor.