Over the last three years Virginia's tech community has donated over $78,000 via the annual event Betting Big On Tech. This year, in lieu of Betting Big On Tech, we're hosting Giving Big To Tech so we can keep supporting teachers and students throughout the school year!

What we do

CodeVA is a non-profit organization that partners with schools, parents, and communities to bring equitable CS education to all of Virginia's students. Since 2014, CodeVA has provided no-cost professional development for Virginia teachers, provided arts-integrated direct to student computer science programs, and advocated to help define Virginia’s computer science education landscape. Your support helps us continue to bring equitable computer science education to all of Virginia's students, teachers, and future tech professionals.

How you can help

Virginia's tech community has come together for the last three years to raise money to support CodeVA through the event Betting Big On Tech presented by Solvaria. Over the last three years, our tech community has raised $78,000+ for the future of tech in Virginia. This year, in lieu of attending Betting Big on Tech, we're asking you to continue your support of our students and teachers directly by helping fund camps, materials, scholarships, tools, and professional learning.

What we need

• Student Camp Scholarship - $150 We make every effort to keep our children’s programming affordable and accessible to every student and provide 150+ full student scholarships a year. Providing a scholarship for a student ensures that they’re able to make the robot or video game of their dreams regardless of their financial situation.
• Teacher Professional Learning Scholarship - $200 Our professional learning programs are delivered at no cost to the 1,000+ public school teachers that attend our sessions every year. Teacher professional learning scholarships cover the curriculum, textbooks, pens, post-it notes, and robots for sessions so teachers can focus on what they do best: teaching and learning!
• Circuit Playground Express - $35 We use these small programmable circuit boards in our children's programs to play laser tag with robotics, make tiny cardboard pianos or DJ decks, and even more. They're full of sensors, speakers, buttons, possibility, and don't require any soldering. We want to send each of the students who use one in our programs home with one, so the learning doesn't end just because class does.


• Art materials for students - $50 All of our Eureka Workshop children’s programming is arts-integrated. We serve 400 (or more) students every year, so in our classes on anything from e-textiles to Rube Goldberg machines we use a lot of thread, markers, motors, paper, glitter, wire, pompoms, and almost anything else you can think of.



• Student iPads - $350 Our youngest learners do best when they’re not held back by a keyboard, so touchscreens are the way to go. Our oldest learners dive deep into developing and coding apps for tablets and smartphonesin our app development classes and camps. Two class sets of iPads means we can have our youngest and oldest students working at the same time!


• You! - (priceless) We love serving our teachers, families, students, and community. Supporters like you are responsible for helping change the educational landscape of computer science of computer science in Virginia and help make everything we do possible one day at a time. Click here if you are interested in making a larger donation and sponsoring CodeVA.

Why we do what we do

Chris Dovi and Rebecca Dovi founded CodeVA in 2014 with the principle that anyone can code, and that every Virginia child has a fundamental right to computer science (CS) literacy, but the motivating factor for Chris and Rebecca came much earlier. While reporting on a competition of basketball shooting robots in 2010, Chris Dovi met Richmond’s Thomas Jefferson High School robotics team. Their team didn’t have the same sponsored t-shirts and materials as their better funded counterparts, but they did have James.

James was the primary designer of the group and kept the whole team focused amidst the stress of the competition. James led his team to place 16th out of 59, in spite of being a completely self-taught Java programmer. After watching James’ victory, Chris worked with Rebecca’s hands on experiences and information from multiple school districts and came to realize that only 10% of schools nationwide were providing CS education for their students. Meanwhile, thousands of CS jobs were going unfilled.

Chris and Rebecca decided to address this problem head on and work to provide equitable access to CS education in their state for every student, and CodeVA has been spearheading that effort under their direction ever since.

Giving Big To Tech Sponsors

          

*Any funds generated above programmatic needs will be will be used to support CodeVA’s larger mission to bring equitable computer science literacy education to all Virginia learners.