TCNJ

9 SPRING 2019 BILL CARDONI understand the technology they'll be working with — and alongside — in their careers. "Students should be comfortable around technology and have confidence while using it," Sleiman says. And these kinds of programs help build life skills at a young age. "Coding helps students become resilient problem solvers — debugging code is hard." "[This team] really believes in what they're doing, and I think that's the heart of entrepreneurship," says Provost William Keep, who was dean of the business school when Sleiman's group first competed in 2016. What Keep likes about Code the Future's business growth is the group's ability to adapt, which is tough these days when the idea of entrepreneurship — big idea, big bucks — can get romanticized. Code the Future isn't a team to do that — at least not any more. They know that businesses, like business plan competitions, come with hard work, risk, and the ability to pivot and rethink if you need to. Over million STEM jobs went unfulfilled last year. And software jobs will grow 30 percent in the next 7 years while the average growth across all jobs is expected to be only 7 percent." Code the Future wants to help fill those vacancies, and the $30,000 prize money means they can get a little more creative in their approach to young coders, trying out new technologies for the programs and investing money in marketing and building their sales team. But more importantly, perhaps for the next generation of STEM workers, they can build excitement and interest in fields that the world will be depending on more and more in the years to come. ■ —Maureen Harmon Maureen Harmon is a freelance writer and director of creative content at Denison University. their first few years of business, the team learned that grants were tough to come by as a nonprofit, so they went for-profit. They've killed ideas that weren't successful and put other complicated programs on the back burner. They've shortened long programs as they adapted to customer needs. Challenges aside, Code the Future continues to move forward. They know the importance of STEM education for U.S. schools, and they also know that the younger the students are when exposed to STEM, the better. "There are a lot of STEM education programs for high schoolers," says Pulkit Gupta, an accounting major. "But the research shows that when you teach kids at a younger age, they are more likely to pursue STEM jobs after graduation." Sleiman believes Code the Future's programming is helping future software developers and engineers. And the stats support her. Says Gupta, "More than two L to R: Dominic Clark, Sarah Sleiman, Pulkit Gupta, and Megha Rathi

• Cover