Two CU-Boulder programs receive $250K in grants from Google

BOULDER – The University of Colorado Boulder on Thursday announced that a pair of programs at the school that teach kids how to code have received a total of $250,000 in grants from Google.

The Google RISE Awards are aimed at supporting efforts to attract girls and minorities to computer science.

AspireIT, a program of the National Center for Women & Information Technology based at CU, won a $150,000 award that it will use to continue work toward its goal of engaging 10,000 middle school girls in learning computer concepts by 2018. AspireIT has launched 70 programs in the last two years, connecting high school and college women with young girls interested in computing.

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Scalable Game Design, a program based in CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science that teaches kids coding through building their own video games, received a $100,000 award from Google for a partnership with Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, Mexico to help take its program to 3,500 kids there. The award will also help the program develop Spanish instructional materials for use by students in the United States.

Google awarded a total of $1.5 million to 37 different organizations for its 2015 funding round.

“This program not only benefits the young girls by introducing them to technology, but also challenges the program leaders to become role models who reverse the effects of stereotypes,” AspireIT program manager Jennifer Manning said in a press release from CU.