This year’s winners of the Youth prize came from the Mosswood Recreation Center. As a result of this prize, among other success, their City of Oakland program will expand with more after-school technology and computer science classes. Dan Finlay is seeking talented instructors to join their team “with the goal of reducing drop-out rates, and increasing college acceptance and scholarship rates.” He explains:

For about the last year, I’ve been teaching computer classes for the City of Oakland.  I started with basic game-programming using Scratch to 7-12 year olds, then moved up to teaching more advanced Flash game design using Stencyl to 10-13 year olds,  and my programs were so popular and effective, I was brought under a new grant to teach more useful life-skills to “at risk of dropping out” high schoolers, and we’ve had a great summer learning HTML, CSS, and some Javascript and jQuery for the more advanced students.

If you or anyone you know might be a good fit for teaching tech-related skills in an after-school program starting in January, send them over to this blog post, where Dan covers all the nitty-gritty details:

An Opportunity For You?
I’m looking for computer-savvy and talented instructors for a variety of subjects that could potentially be taught as soon as January 1, 2013.  These positions would hypothetically be paid between $18-$20/hr, for a few hours per class, each weekly.  I’m currently interested in a wide variety of topics, but am also open to arguments in favor of certain core topics being taught over others.

As one of the founders of Code for Oakland, and a member of the committee that planned the event that just happened on July 21st, seeing posts like this one: “Code For Oakland: The Most Diverse Hackathon Ever” | Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog http://bit.ly/NmrfOi  and this one: Code For Oakland: The Most Diverse Hackathon Ever - Forbes http://onforb.es/O43dYZmake me happy beyond measure.
I moved to Oakland in 2008, after a short start-up stint in Boulder and many years in Silicon Valley, and immediately started to wonder where the tech community was, how we could build more tech community and why a city like Oakland with good infrastructure and cheap commercial real estate didn’t have more of a start-up scene.
Fast forward 4 years and we’ve got alot more traction on all these issues—but we need to keep hammering on diversity and opportunity for everyone—and not re-create the old school view of what an entrepreneur, programmer, coder, or product developer is (and you probably know exactly what I am talking about.)
So we’re looking for ways to keep Code for Oakland going, and expand and build on it and get more partners and supporters. We’re also sharing our process with people from other cities who have made inquiries—if you’d like to do a civic hackathon a la CFO in your city—let us know.
Some photos from the event here: